Women’s speech features used by the characters of Sex and The City movie

ABSTRACT

This research focuses on analyzing women’s speech features used by the characters of Sex and the City movie. Women’s speech features are several types of speech which reflect uncertainty and lack of confidence as the characteristics of women’s speech. Meanwhile, women’s language is a language that signifies the characteristic of women such as avoiding direct and forceful statements, and relying on conforms that conveys hesitation and uncertainty.

The aim of this research is to find out how the characters of Sex and the City use women’s speech features. The design of this research is descriptive qualitative. It describes women’s speech features used by the Character of Sex and the City movie. The data are words, phrases, clauses, and sentences that are used by four characters namely Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha in several settings such as restaurant, apartment, Mexican resort and streets. The data are analyzed firstly by finding the context of the utterance, classifying them into ten types of women’s speech features, and then explaining and describing the utterance based on the categorization, including explaining the functional usage, the meaning of the utterance and the factors behind the use of those utterances based on the Lakoff’s theory of women’s speech features.

The findings of this research showed that the characters of Sex and the City movie used women’s speech features which reflect uncertainty and lack of confidence. They used women’s speech features because women tend to have trouble in starting the conversation and avoiding saying something definite related to their statement. In addition, not all types of women’s speech features were used by four characters. There were only eight types of women's speech features used in the dialogues, such as lexical hedges or fillers, tag question, rising intonation on declaratives, `empty' adjectives, intensifiers, superpolite forms, avoidance of strong swear words, and emphatic stress. Two kinds of features which were not used by the characters were specialized vocabularies and hypercorrect grammar.