Women’s Language Features in Making Request in
Pride and Prejudice Movie
Syafda Dini Pratiwi
1*
, Ike Revita
2
{syafdadinipratiwi@gmail.com
1
, ikerevita@hum.unand.ac.id
2
}
Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Andalas, Padang, Indonesia
12
Abstract. Women are the creatures that are required to speak more politely than men.
The phenomenon is in line with the gender perspective where men and women are
different socially. Then, they are also treated unsimilarly. The use of women’s language
features will support the politeness of the women's statement. Therefore, it can represent
their social status in society. Besides, there must be certain functions of women’s
language features, especially when making the request. A request is an act of asking
something and asking someone to do something. This article aims to describe the
functions of women’s language features when making requests depicted in the movie
Pride and Prejudice. The data were taken from a high rating movie titled Pride and
Prejudice 2005. The movie filmed five sisters from an English family who deal with
marriage, morality, and misconception issues. All requests from women’s utterances
became the data. The observational method with the non-participant technique was used
to collect the data. The result of the analysis was presented narratively. After analyzing
the data, it is found that there are two functions used by the women characters in Pride
and Prejudice movie in making requests indicating their language features. They are 1)
hedging devices and 2) boosting devices.
Keywords: functions of women’s language features, request, women’s language features
utterances
1 Introduction
Language is a set of symbols in the form of written, spoken, and signed, which are used by
humans to communicate with each other. As social creatures, both men and women use
language to communicate. However, several differences occur when both men and women are
communicating, even though they use the same language. It means that both men and women
use language differently in their speech. That is why women used women’s language features
when doing communication.
Anjani (2009) [17], found there are three reasons of why women decided to use women’s
language features. The first one is because women are the guardian or role of the society,
women is more status conscious than men, and women are categorized as subordinate group in
society. Holmes [1] stated that men tend to focus on the context of the talk. Meanwhile,
women focus on how the talk affects the feelings of others. It can be seen in the following
utterances 1-2 how women talk by considering the feeling of others:
1. Can I wear your spotted muslin? Oh please, Jane
2. Well, tell me quickly, my love
ICGCS 2021, August 30-31, Padang, Indonesia
Copyright © 2022 EAI
DOI 10.4108/eai.30-8-2021.2316297