The study investigates, from analytical perspective, the differences and the similarities between same and different gender conflicted dialogues in the American TV. Series Desperate Housewives, season one, premiered October 2004. The main reason for choosing this comic / dramatic series is that it exposes multiple and complex types of relationships between different social actors: the husband, the wife, the mother, the son, the daughter and the female friend. In order to carry out this study, the researcher chooses critical discourse analysis as a theoretical framework. Critical discourse analysis is an interdisciplinary approach that interprets different texts in accordance with concepts such as power, ideology, dominance, etc… The research utilizes the methods provided in Fairclough's (1989 and 2003).
The results of the study prove that cross-gender conflicted dialogues are more aggressive and stronger than one-sex conversations. This aggression is expressed in the disputants' ultra use of antonyms, lexical collocations, turn-taking, modality, metaphors, negative evaluations, emphatic language and tough language. On the other hand, both types of disputants depend on using some specific devices with near or approximate rates. Examples of these devices are declarative mood, interrogative mood, synonyms, additive relations, contrastive relations and negation.
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