| Summary: | 碩士 === 靜宜大學 === 英國語文學系 === 101 === In daily conversation, people use hyperbole or hyperbolic expressions very often. Recently, there have been a few studies discussing hyperbole in conversation in everyday context in different language corpora. Most of these studies focused on the pragmatic relationship between speakers and listeners (e.g. McCarthy & Carter, 2004; Norrick, 2004; Hsiao & Su, 2010). A few other studies also examined social variables like gender and/or age differences in their studies of hyperbolic expressions (e.g. Ohlrogge & Tsang, 2004; Claridge, 2011). To contribute to the research in hyperbole, this study examines the use of hyperbole in Mandarin in conversations and considers the factor of speaker’s gender on the use of hyperbole. Specifically, this study examined and analyzed the natural conversation of hyperbole in Mandarin Chinese used by university students of different genders in their daily conversations on the TV program: 大學生了沒 (University). The author adopted six characteristics of hyperbole to identify hyperbolic expressions from the data, and then categorized the data into five categories based on Huang (2002) and Shen (1992, 2010). The results showed that men use more hyperbole than women do in conversations of Mandarin Chinese. The reasons for men using more hyperbole than women do are because of the competitiveness in men’s speech style and their tendency to dominate the conversation. Further, different genders have different preferential categories of hyperbole usage. This study provides evidence that there are gender differences in the use of hyperbole in Mandarin Chinese.
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