I’m telling you what’s best for you: A comparative study of the speech act of suggestion in e-commerce live streaming between male and female streamers
A Comparative Study of the Speech Act of Suggestion in E-commerce Live-streaming between Male and Female Hosts
Abstract
E-commerce live streaming has developed rapidly in recent years. The pragmatic strategy of e-commerce streamers is an important factor affecting sales. This study explores gender-specific pragmatic strategies in the speech act of suggestion by analyzing the discourse of the top ten male and female Taobao anchors during the Double Eleven Event, a promotional festival in China. With the help of corpus tools, based on Eden Sum-hung Li’s pragmatic strategy model of the speech act of suggestion, this study conducts a comparative analysis of the above discourse. The study finds that at the level of perspective, both male and female streamers use hearer-dominance suggestions most, followed by the speaker-dominance one. The difference is that male streamers use the speaker-dominance strategy more frequently than female streamers. At the level of directness, male and female streamers vary greatly in strategy distribution. Female streamers use the three strategies with similar frequency, while male streamers mainly use conventionally indirect suggestions and less non-conventionally indirect suggestions. At the level of politeness, both male and female streamers use more internal redressive actions and relatively fewer external ones. However, female streamers employ suggestions without redressive actions more frequently than male streamers in discourse. The above phenomenon can be explained by three reasons: features of the e-commerce live streaming format, gender of the streamers, and the audience. Specifically, the cross-screen communication method and fast pace of e-commerce live broadcasts raise requirements for the type of suggestions. The gender difference leads to different relationship positioning between the streamers and the audience, which affects the selection and use of male and female streamers’ pragmatic strategies of the speech act of suggestion.
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