An Analysis of Women’s Language Features Used by Emma Chamberlain in Her Podcast ‘Anything Goes with Emma Chamberlain’

Abstract

This thesis aims to find out the women’s language features and to describe the functions of the women’s language features used by Emma Chamberlain in the selected episode of her podcast ‘Anything Goes with Emma Chamberlain’. This thesis was conducted by using qualitative descriptive method. The data of this study was taken from one episode of Emma Chamberlain’s podcast entitled ‘growing HURTS’. The data was analysed using women’s language features theory by Lakoff (1975) and women’s language features function theory by Holmes (2013). The results showed that there are 8 women’s language features used by Emma Chamberlain in the selected episode of her podcast. In 229 utterances, there are 345 occurrences of women’s language features which consist of 164 lexical hedges or fillers, 12 tag questions, 68 rising intonation on declaratives, 2 empty adjectives, 58 intensifiers, 26 hypercorrect grammars, 3 super-polite forms, and 12 emphatic stresses. Precise color terms and avoidance of strong swear words feature are not found in the data. The result for the function showed that 4 out of 5 women’s language feature function are found. In 345 women’s language features, 143 features used to show uncertainty, 63 features used to intensify/emphasize, 67 features used to get response, and 72 used features to express feeling. One function that is not found in the data is to soften certain expressions.