1.1Background

The advice-giving linguistic behavior is defined as an utterance where an idea is put forward as a possibility for the addressee’s future action (Li 2010Li, Eden Sum-Hung 2010 “Making Suggestions: A Contrastive Study of Young Hong Kong and Australian Students.” Journal of Pragmatics 42 (3): 598–616. ). Bach and Harnish (1979)Bach, Kent, and Robert M. Harnish 1979 Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. maintained that the force of the advising illocution is for the recipient to embrace an evaluation or idea which is beneficial to himself/herself. Namely, “what the speaker expresses is not the desire that H does a certain action but the belief that doing it is a good idea, that is in H’s interest” (Bach and Harnish 1979Bach, Kent, and Robert M. Harnish 1979 Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press., 50).11.H stands for hearer.

Despite the good intention of the advice-giver, the advising act is intrinsically face-destructive because the advisor impinges on the advisee’s freedom of future actions and threatens his/her negative face22.One’s negative face is his/her desire to be free from imposition and intrusion from others and preserve one’s freedom and autonomy (Brown and Levinson 1987Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ). (e.g., Brown and Levinson 1987Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Martínez-Flor 2010Martínez-Flor, Alicia 2010 “Suggestion: How Social Norms Affect Pragmatic Behavior.” In Speech Act Performance: Theoretical, Empirical, and Methodological Issues, ed. by Alicia Martínez Flor, and Esther Usó Juan, 258–273. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. ; Vásquez 2004Vásquez, Camilla 2004 ““Very Carefully Managed”: Advice and Suggestions in Post-Observation Meetings.” Linguistics and Education 15 (1–2): 33–58. ). Moreover, the speech act of advice-giving “involves a speaker assuming some deficit in the knowledge state of a recipient … [it] is an activity which assumes or establishes an asymmetry between the participants” (Hutchby 1995Hutchby, Ian 1995 “Aspects of Recipient Design in Expert Advice-Giving on Call-In Radio.” Discourse Processes 19: 219–238. , 221). Namely, the advising act grants the speaker specific knowledge power and frames him more reasonable and more in control than the hearer, thereby contributing to a distancing effect (Tannen 1990Tannen, Deborah 1990 You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York, NY: William Morrow.; Verschueren 1981Verschueren, Jef 1981 “The Semantics of Forgotten Routines.” In Conversational Routines, ed. by Florian Coulmas, 133–153. The Hague: Mouton. ).

The speech act of advice-giving has received researchers’ attention since the 1970s. However, comparatively little literature has been published on gendered advice use, although gender has been widely acknowledged as a social factor that often casts significant impacts on people’s styles of communication (Bach and Harnish 1979Bach, Kent, and Robert M. Harnish 1979 Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.; Rintell 1979Rintell, Ellen 1979 “Getting Your Speech Act Together: The Pragmatic Ability of Second Language Learners.” Working Papers on Bilingualism 17: 97–106.). Moreover, many existing advice studies have focused on interactions in private settings. Little is known about the pragmatic configuration of advice patterns in public encounters. Nevertheless, people’s speech styles are not absolute but context-sensitive (Holmes 2006Holmes, Janet 2006 Gendered Talk at Work: Constructing Gender Identity through Workplace Discourse. Malden, MA: Blackwell. ; Tannen 2005Tannen, Deborah 2005 Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk among Friends. Oxford: Oxford University Press.). Speakers of either gender may change their communication patterns depending on their speech environment. That is because the same linguistic expression may reflect different intentions or effects in different situational contexts and the same intention or effect may be framed with varying linguistic constructions in different speech encounters (Ochs 1992Ochs, Elinor 1992 “Indexing Gender.” In Rethinking Context: Language as an Interactive Phenomenon, ed. by Alessandro Duranti, and Charles Goodwin, 335–358. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.).

Due to the limitation of the existing literature, this investigation aimed to explore how people’s gender influences the pragmatics of their advice patterns in public media discourse. More specifically, this study scrutinized the advice comments addressed by male and female judges to competitors of different genders in Taiwan’s TV talent contests. It is hoped that this study will contribute to our understanding of gendered advice-giving in different speech settings.

The following section first reviews some advice investigations involving the gender variable. Next, limitations in the earlier attempts are discussed and specific research questions are presented. The results of the current study will illuminate how men’s and women’s advising behaviors in the media discourse deviate from the gendered advice patterns in private encounters and how the contestant’s gender influences the judge’s selection of mitigating devices. Finally, conclusions are presented and suggestions are made for future research.

1.2Gender and the speech act of advice-giving

Due to the lack of research on gendered advice-giving in the media discourse, this section will review some significant studies that analyzed gendered advice comments elicited from other speech settings.

Rintell (1979)Rintell, Ellen 1979 “Getting Your Speech Act Together: The Pragmatic Ability of Second Language Learners.” Working Papers on Bilingualism 17: 97–106. pioneered the investigation of the speech act of advice in the literature. She compared Spanish students’ use of advice expressions in their mother tongue (L1) and English as a second language (L2). With the data collected from role-plays, Rintell discussed how the age and gender of the addressees influence the students’ advice expressions. The study found that significant age and gender factors only appear in the participants’ English advice expressions, while the same variables exert no remarkable impacts on the students’ Spanish productions.

After Rintell’s (1979)Rintell, Ellen 1979 “Getting Your Speech Act Together: The Pragmatic Ability of Second Language Learners.” Working Papers on Bilingualism 17: 97–106. pioneering study, a few sociolinguists have followed her insight and started to examine gender disparity in advice-giving. For example, based on unsolicited advice collected from an American university, Boatman (1987)Boatman, Dana 1987 “A Study of Unsolicited Advice.” Working Papers in Educational Linguistics 3 (1): 35–60. studied the effects of gender and the relative status of the student advice-givers and receivers on the distribution of advice opinions. It was reported that the hearer’s gender is the variable that influences those female students’ advice use, whereas it does not remarkably affect the occurrence of those male students’ advice comments. Similarly, with the data collected from an American university, Thonus (1999)Thonus, Terese 1999 “Dominance in Academic Writing Tutorials: Gender, Language Proficiency, and the Offering of Suggestions.” Discourse and Society 10 (2): 225–248. inspected the effect of the tutees’ gender on the frequency and pragmatics of the advice given by tutors of either gender. Results showed that the female tutors generally give more advice opinions than their male counterparts. Besides, the females are slightly, but not significantly, more inclined to mitigate their advice expressions in the mixed-gender dyads than in the same-gender dyads.

In addition to the English advice studies, there are some advice investigations in Chinese literature. Kuo (1995)Kuo, Sai-Hua 1995 Gender and Discourse: A Comparative Study of Male-Female Differences in Conversational Style. Final Research Report for Taiwan’s National Science Council. is the first researcher to tackle gendered advice-giving in Mandarin Chinese. She analyzed twenty-two examples of advice units elicited from twenty-four student conversations recorded on a university campus. Her results showed that the advising strategies employed by men and women are not identical. The females’ sub-corpus contains imperatives, sentences containing auxiliary modals or hedges, and justification with advice forms. On the other hand, advice expressions in the males’ sub-corpus are all framed as imperatives.

Chen’s (2002)Chen, Tzu-Chin Jill 2002 “Suggestion in Chinese: Its Use in Group Counseling.” MA thesis, National Tsing-Hua University. investigation into Mandarin Chinese advice also revealed some impacts of speaker gender on their communication styles. Chen used audio-taped data from university students’ in-class counseling practices to examine how men and women encode their advice. Results revealed that compared to the male students, the female students employ more lexical hedges and intensifiers in their advice comments. Regarding the pragmatic strategy of the advice expressions, the males favor option offering, while the females prefer preparatory condition inquiry to encode their messages. The author suggested that the females’ advice comments are more encouraging and frequently express a sense of solidarity.

With data elicited from a DCT and a multiple-choice questionnaire, Fang (2005)Fang, Zhi-Ying 2005 “On the Speech Act of Suggestions in Chinese: A Study on the Speech Act of Suggestions Made by Chinese University Students.” MA thesis, Anhui University. scrutinized how Mandarin-speaking college students express their advice in twelve simulated scenarios. The study aimed to examine whether and how the advice-giver’s gender, relative social power, social distance to the receiver, and the embarrassment degree of the advice affect the advice-giver’s language use. Results indicated that the gender variation resides in the participants’ employment of jokes. A small number of the males’ advice comments are coded as jokes, which are absent in the females’ sub-corpus.

1.3Limitations of the existing literature on gendered advice-giving

While the existing literature on gendered advice-giving had undeniable merits of offering valuable insights, they are not without any limitations. First, Rintell’s (1979Rintell, Ellen 1979 “Getting Your Speech Act Together: The Pragmatic Ability of Second Language Learners.” Working Papers on Bilingualism 17: 97–106.) study compared the advising behaviors of language learners’ L1 and L2 performances. The results found that the students’ L2 productions were affected by the gender of their addressees, which, however, did not significantly impact the students’ L1 productions. The disparity that emerges from the L1 and L2 discourses leads us to question the suitability of verifying the effect of the gender variable on the speaker’s linguistic behavior by examining student learners’ interlanguage performances. Due to the students’ immature L2 ability, the pragmatic variations of their interlanguage productions may be restricted and bias the study results.

The studies of Kuo (1995)Kuo, Sai-Hua 1995 Gender and Discourse: A Comparative Study of Male-Female Differences in Conversational Style. Final Research Report for Taiwan’s National Science Council., Chen (2002)Chen, Tzu-Chin Jill 2002 “Suggestion in Chinese: Its Use in Group Counseling.” MA thesis, National Tsing-Hua University., and Fang (2005)Fang, Zhi-Ying 2005 “On the Speech Act of Suggestions in Chinese: A Study on the Speech Act of Suggestions Made by Chinese University Students.” MA thesis, Anhui University. are investigations based on Mandarin Chinese data collected from student participants. Despite the resemblance of their corpora, the speaker’s gender was reported to be significant to one’s advising act in the studies of Kuo (1995)Kuo, Sai-Hua 1995 Gender and Discourse: A Comparative Study of Male-Female Differences in Conversational Style. Final Research Report for Taiwan’s National Science Council. and Chen (2002)Chen, Tzu-Chin Jill 2002 “Suggestion in Chinese: Its Use in Group Counseling.” MA thesis, National Tsing-Hua University. but insignificant in the study of Fang (2005)Fang, Zhi-Ying 2005 “On the Speech Act of Suggestions in Chinese: A Study on the Speech Act of Suggestions Made by Chinese University Students.” MA thesis, Anhui University.. Furthermore, although the importance of the speaker’s gender was noted in Kuo’s (1995)Kuo, Sai-Hua 1995 Gender and Discourse: A Comparative Study of Male-Female Differences in Conversational Style. Final Research Report for Taiwan’s National Science Council. investigation, the finding was based on her analysis of twenty-two advice units. Owing to the paucity of data in Kuo’s investigation, the reported linguistic configurations might not sufficiently represent the Chinese speakers’ advising behavior. Also, Kuo’s study did not specify the relationship between the interlocutors and the situational contexts of the collected data. Interpreting men’s and women’s divergent advising behaviors without specific contextual information is challenging. Therefore, it is necessary to re-examine the issue of gender variation in Chinese advice-giving with a corpus where the demographic backgrounds of the interlocutors and the setting of the speech events are noted.

The studies of Boatman (1987)Boatman, Dana 1987 “A Study of Unsolicited Advice.” Working Papers in Educational Linguistics 3 (1): 35–60. and Thonus (1999)Thonus, Terese 1999 “Dominance in Academic Writing Tutorials: Gender, Language Proficiency, and the Offering of Suggestions.” Discourse and Society 10 (2): 225–248. analyzed the significance of the speaker’s gender and the hearer’s gender to the construction of advice messages. However, the outcomes of these investigations are incompatible. Moreover, in Boatman’s (1987)Boatman, Dana 1987 “A Study of Unsolicited Advice.” Working Papers in Educational Linguistics 3 (1): 35–60. study, the pragmatics of the advice expressions remained uninvestigated; namely, only the distribution of the advice messages in the corpus was discussed.

1.4Aims

This investigation examined gender disparity in advice-giving, with the data elicited from two talent contests in Taiwan. The importance of the judges’ gender and the contestants’ gender to the pragmatics of the advice comments in the media discourse was tackled. The specific research questions are as follows:

1. What are the pragmatic strategies that the judges use to encode their advice in the talent contests?

2. What are the internal and external modifiers that the judges use to redress their advice in the talent contests?

3. Is there any statistical value concerning the correlation between the gender of the interlocutors (i.e., the judges and the contestants) and the pragmatic configuration of the advice expressions in the media discourse?

2.1Source of the data

The data of the present investigation were from two Taiwan-based TV talent competitions, including fifty-six episodes of Super Designer (designing contest) and nineteen episodes of Super Idol (singing contest), broadcasting from 2010 to 2014. Each episode of Super Designer and Super Idol lasted ninety and 120 minutes, respectively. These TV programs were downloaded from the Internet; the audio files in each episode were transcribed word by word for data analysis. To collect data from two different programs was to balance the number of judges and contestants of different gender roles. There were thirty-eight judges (twelve females and nineteen males) and ninety-five contestants (forty-three females and fifty-two males) in the present corpus.

These two TV shows had the same hostess, whose duties were to lead guest interviews and ensure the flow of the shows. In addition, these two talent contests included a preselected judge’s panel composed of four to five experts from the fashion or music industry. While those experts may play different roles outside the TV shows, they were all endowed with the same institutional power in the judge’s panel to evaluate the contestants’ performances, abilities, skills, etc. While the judges varied in each episode of the same TV show, the contestants of each season of the same TV program remained unchanged. During each episode, every contestant had to complete a design or sing a song, which was evaluated by the judges. The contestants with worse performances, however, were excluded from later competitions. Therefore, the contestant number in each episode was different.

During the evaluation sessions of the TV talent contests, the judges might give some advice in addition to making positive or negative remarks because they had the obligation or responsibility to inform the participants what and how they could do to improve themselves or ensure better future performances. Despite the greater institutional power of the judges, they still had to invest considerable thought in fabricating their advice comments because the evaluative remarks were not kept between themselves and their addressees; instead, the judges’ comments were broadcasted to the public audience on TV. To play a role in the judge’s panel in the TV programs, the experts must set aside their personae and perform according to the expectations of the TV producers and the target audience, at least to a certain extent. Namely, the media functions as a space where alternative social images and gender identities of the judges can be established by the TV companies to cater to the preferences of their viewers and even to transmit certain ideologies (Kim 2010Kim, Youna 2010 “Female Individualization? Transnational Mobility and Media Consumption of Asian Women.” Media, Culture and Society 32 (1): 25–43. ; Shaw and Lin 2012Shaw, Ping, and Chin-Yi Lin 2012 “Move Freely: Single Women and Mobility in Taiwanese TV Advertising,” In Women and the Media in Asia, ed. by Youna Kim, 130–142. London/New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. ). With the data of the current corpus, we set out to analyze how the judges encode advice messages in their evaluative talks and whether the gender of the interlocutors influences the pragmatics of the advising act.

In this study, advising linguistic behavior is defined as the utterance where an idea is put forward as a possibility for the contestant’s action or future performances and is believed to be beneficial (Li 2010Li, Eden Sum-Hung 2010 “Making Suggestions: A Contrastive Study of Young Hong Kong and Australian Students.” Journal of Pragmatics 42 (3): 598–616. ). Elicitation of the advising linguistic behaviors was primarily based on the semantic and pragmatic features of the utterances addressed by the judges to convey their communication intent. Moreover, the media discourse’s contextual information and the speech context’s cultural information were also considered. The current database encompassed 234 instances of the judges’ advice expressions. Among those advice units, sixty-three tokens were addressed by male judges to male contestants (M-to-M dyads), sixty tokens were addressed by male judges to female contestants (M-to-F dyads), fifty-three tokens were addressed by female judges to female contestants (F-to-F dyads), and fifty-eight tokens were addressed by female judges to male contestants (F-to-M dyads).

2.2Data coding and analysis

Most advice expressions in the database are composed of more than one semantic formula, which can be a word, a phrase, or a sentence with at least one pragmatic illocutionary force. Therefore, speech event was chosen as the analytical unit to analyze the intriguing configuration of the advice expressions. Drawing on the insight of Blum-Kulka et al. (1989)Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House, and Gabriel Kasper 1989 Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex., a speech event consists of at least one head act and optionally one or more than one supportive move. The head act of a speech event is an essential element that explicitly or implicitly entails the advice force of the speech. On the other hand, the supportive move is an optional component that precedes and/or follows the head act. The pragmatic function of the supportive move is to modify the proposition of the advising illocution within the head act.

Table 1 illustrates how advice messages in the present corpus were structurally decomposed into head acts and supportive moves. In this example, the first semantic formula, functioning as a praising illocutionary act, was coded as a supportive move whose discoursal function is to redress the imposition of the following advice. The actual advising illocutionary act is in the second constituent, where the judge suggested the contestant think about the creativity of his design. Subsequently, the judge employed the other supportive move to explicate why the hearer’s creativity should be improved. The judge’s justification redressed the given advice because it manifested his good intention to help with the contestant’s problem and assumed cooperation (Brown and Levinson 1987Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ).

To analyze the pragmatic function of the head acts, the coding schemes developed by Li (2010)Li, Eden Sum-Hung 2010 “Making Suggestions: A Contrastive Study of Young Hong Kong and Australian Students.” Journal of Pragmatics 42 (3): 598–616. and Chen (2002)Chen, Tzu-Chin Jill 2002 “Suggestion in Chinese: Its Use in Group Counseling.” MA thesis, National Tsing-Hua University. were modified and integrated for the present analysis. The advising illocutionary acts in the current database were classified into eight categories, as shown in Table 2, with examples from the present corpus. These strategies were arranged according to the decreasing degree of directness.

After analyzing the pragmatics of the head acts, modifiers for softening the force of the head acts were examined. The redressive actions are either inside or outside the head act domain, namely internal or external modifiers. As exemplified in Table 3, the internal modifiers are imposition minimizer, cajoler, appealer, subjectivizer, quality hedge, and hedge addressed to politeness strategies.

The categorization of the external modifiers in this investigation drew heavily on the studies of Edmondson (1981)Edmondson, Willis 1981 Spoken Discourse: A Model for Analysis. London: Longman., Blum-Kulka et al. (1989)Blum-Kulka, Shoshana, Juliane House, and Gabriel Kasper 1989 Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood, NJ: Ablex., Chen (2002)Chen, Tzu-Chin Jill 2002 “Suggestion in Chinese: Its Use in Group Counseling.” MA thesis, National Tsing-Hua University., and Li (2010)Li, Eden Sum-Hung 2010 “Making Suggestions: A Contrastive Study of Young Hong Kong and Australian Students.” Journal of Pragmatics 42 (3): 598–616. . The taxonomy is in Table 4, with examples from the current corpus.

After the advice messages were coded, one-way ANOVA analyses were performed to compare the distributions of the advising and redressive strategies in the advice comments addressed in the four gender combinations. When the variance analyses’ results turned out positive, LSD post hoc tests were run for pairwise comparisons of the subgroups, aiming to illuminate whether it is the judge’s gender and/or the contestant’s gender that is vital to the stylistic variations of the advice expressions. The specific null hypothesis is that the gender of the judges and the contestants have no remarkable impact on the judges’ advising behaviors. A .05 alpha level of significance was chosen as the cutoff point to test the null hypothesis.

4.1The speaker’s gender

The quantitative outcomes in Table 4 indicate that the distributions of the advising strategies with different levels of directness in the male and female sub-corpora were not significantly different. Namely, the judges of either gender were equally polite (or impolite) while encoding their advice expressions. Such gender invariance with respect to their selection of advising strategies might be attributed to the fact that in Mandarin Chinese, the directness/indirectness of directive speech acts, such as advice-giving, does not have a powerful connection to the speaker’s politeness/impoliteness. Instead, the Chinese linguistic politeness behaviors are primarily manifested through mitigating lexical terms (e.g., qing ‘please’), sentence-final tags (e.g., hao bu hao ‘okay not okay’), repetitions of verbs, term of addressees, or supportive moves at the discourse level (Hong 1999Hong, Gao 1999 “Features of Request Strategies in Chinese.” Working Papers of Lund University, Department of Linguistics 47: 73–86.; Skewis 2003Skewis, Malcolm 2003 “Mitigated Directness in Honglou Meng: Direct Speech Acts and Politeness in Eighteen Century Chinese.” Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2): 161–189. ). This tendency lent support to our statistical results in Tables 6 and 7, which reveal that the gender of the judges was vital to the distributions of the internal and external modifiers of the advising speech events in the current database. Specifically, the male judges used substantially more internal and external modifiers, including appealer (Example 1), showing commiseration (Example 2), sweetener (Example 3), and giving encouragement (Example 4), than the female judges.

Past research of gendered talk frequently noted that women are more inclined to embrace the encouraging, facilitative, and supportive communicative style, while men tend to take the dominating, assertive, and authoritative interactive pattern, even in workplace settings (e.g., Holmes 2008Holmes, Janet 2008 “Gendered Discourse at Work.” Language and Linguistics Compass 2, 478–495. ; Horikawa et al. 1991Horikawa, Randy Y., Jeffrey Mickey, and Steven Miura 1991 “Effects of Request Legitimacy on the Compliance-Gaining Tactics of Male and Female Managers.” Communication Monographs 58: 421–436. ; Kendall and Tannen 1997Kendall, Shari, and Deborah Tannen 1997 “Gender and Language in the Workplace.” In Gender and Discourse, ed. by Ruth Wodak, 81–105. London: Sage. ; Tannen 1994Tannen, Deborah 1994 Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work. New York, NY: Avon Books.; Tracy and Eisenberg 1990Tracy, Karen, and Eric Eisenberg 1990 “Giving Criticisms: A Multiple Goal Case Study.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 24 (1–4): 37–70. ; Woods 1989Woods, Nicola 1989 “Talking Shop: Sex and Status as Determinants of Floor Apportionment in a Work Setting.” In Women in Their Speech Communities, ed. by Jennifer Coates, and Deborah Cameron, 141–157. London: Longman.). For instance, in her study of men’s and women’s language patterns in corporations, Tannen (1994)Tannen, Deborah 1994 Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work. New York, NY: Avon Books. reported that while giving directives and feedback, those female superordinates are more likely to frame their directives as advice messages to reduce their illocutionary force. In addition, women often use redressive devices, such as showing approval, to soften their expressions. In contrast, those male managers are prone to reinforce their directives and feedback to increase the power distinction between themselves and their subordinates. Similarly, that workplace interaction styles often disadvantage women has also been reported in Holmes’s (e.g., 2006Holmes, Janet 2006 Gendered Talk at Work: Constructing Gender Identity through Workplace Discourse. Malden, MA: Blackwell. , 2008Holmes, Janet 2008 “Gendered Discourse at Work.” Language and Linguistics Compass 2, 478–495. ) gender studies and some investigations of doctor-patient communications (e.g., Ainsworth-Vaughn 1998Ainsworth-Vaughn, Nancy 1998 Claiming Power in Doctor-Patient Talk. Oxford: Oxford University Press.; Fisher 1993Fisher, Sue 1993 “Gender, Power, Resistance: Is Care the Remedy?” In Negotiating at the Margins: The Gendered Discourse of Power and Resistance, ed. by Sue Fisher, and Kathy Davis, 87–121. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.; West 1990West, Candace 1990 “Not Just Doctor’s Orders: Directive-Response Sequences in Patients’ Visits to Women and Men Physicians.” Discourse and Society 1 (1): 85–111. ).

According to earlier gender studies, female professionals are more likely than male professionals to downplay their authority and minimize power distance to their subordinates. However, why did the female judges utilize fewer redressive devices than the male judges to attenuate their advice in the present corpus? These findings might result from the sustaining gender disparity in Taiwan’s society and the context where the advice comments were addressed.

Due to its deep-rooted impacts from the Confucian philosophy, Taiwan has been practicing and advocating patriarchal ideologies for decades (Lee et al. 2021Lee, John Chi-Kin, Stephen Yam-Wing Yip, and Raymond Ho-Man Kong 2021 Life and Moral Education in Greater China. New York, NY: Routledge. ; Tsai 2006Tsai, Chiung-Tzu L. 2006 “The Influence of Confucianism on Women’s Leisure in Taiwan.” Leisure Studies 25 (4): 469–476. ). Although Taiwan tops other Asian countries in gender equality according to a report released in 2020 by the Department of Gender Equality of Taiwan’s Executive Yuan33.The report can be found on the official website of Taiwan’s Executive Yuan: https://​english​.ey​.gov​.tw​/Page​/61BF20C3E89B856​/667d7eb1​-c124​-431e​-af93​-aae0bdd7aaf1 , Taiwanese women’s empowerment does not fundamentally challenge the patriarchal system. Namely, it does not entirely liberalize the society and render it more open-minded to an egalitarian norm of gender practices. As Neubauer and Kuar argued (2019Neubauer, Deane E., and Surinderpal Kaur 2019 Gender and the Changing Face of Higher Education in Asia Pacific. London: Palgrave Macmillan. , 6), in Taiwan, “gender inequality is still pervasive in implicit and subtle ways as the patriarchal and conservative values of the society continue to be expressed in institutional values and practices.”

Consequently, due possibly to the subordination of women in Taiwan’s society, the females in the mixed-gender judges’ panel had to draw on some linguistic tactics to craft their professional identity and create an ideal image while doing evaluations in the talent competitions. Specifically, the female judges’ avoidance of the mitigating expressions in their advice comments might be for constructing an assertive, professional, and authoritative role to gain respect and public recognition in the media discourse.

In the context of the talent contest, the male and female judges had greater institutional power than the contest participants. However, although the judges of either gender had the same institutional power in the judge’s panel, the male judges were endowed with greater social power than their female counterparts owing to the patriarchal values upheld by Taiwan’s society. Accordingly, the male judges were the highest-status individuals in the context of the TV talent competition. Despite their ultimate superiority, the male judges did not utilize the masculine communication style presented in the prior gender research, such as Tannen (1994)Tannen, Deborah 1994 Talking from 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work. New York, NY: Avon Books., while giving advice. Instead, the male judges underplayed their status and power by using significantly more internal and external modifiers to redress their advice comments. By avoiding abusing the privilege of their superior identity, the prestige and authority of the male judges were maintained and even reinforced to a certain degree (Pearson 1988Pearson, Bethyl 1988 “Power and Politeness in Conversation: Encoding of Face-Threatening Acts a Church Business Meeting.” Anthropological Linguistics 30 (1): 68–93.; Smith-Hefner 1985Smith-Hefner, Nancy J. 1985 “Women and Politeness: The Javanese Example.” Language in Society 17: 535–554. ). Moreover, the male judges’ frequent use of positive face-oriented polite expressions, including appealer, showing commiseration, sweetener, and giving encouragement, is regarded as a virtue of the authoritative figures in the Chinese cultural environment (Liu et al. 2010Liu, James H., Mei-Chih Li, and Xiaodong Yue 2010 “Chinese Social Identity and Intergroup Relations: The Influence of Benevolent Authority.” In The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Psychology, ed. by Michael Harris Bond, 579–598. Oxford: Oxford University Press.; Wang et al. 2005Wang, Jia, Greg G. Wang, Wendy E. A. Ruona, and Jay W. Rojewski 2005 “Confucian Values and the Implications for International HRD.” Human Resource Development International 8 (3): 311–326. ). Put simply, the benevolent linguistic behaviors of the male judges were not indications of their hierarchical inferiority; instead, their politeness behaviors were strategic moves to gain more genuine respect from the contestants and the television audience (Liu et al. 2010Liu, James H., Mei-Chih Li, and Xiaodong Yue 2010 “Chinese Social Identity and Intergroup Relations: The Influence of Benevolent Authority.” In The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Psychology, ed. by Michael Harris Bond, 579–598. Oxford: Oxford University Press.; Reynolds 1985Reynolds, Katsue Akiba 1985 “Female Speakers of Japanese.” Feminist Issues 5 (2): 13–46. ).

From the study results, we can notice that in the media discourse, the female judges’ advising behaviors are culturally more masculine-oriented. In contrast, the male judges’ speech patterns are more inclined to Taiwan’s traditional social construct of femininity. Such phenomenon lent support to the notion that discourse plays an important role in shaping and differentiating people’s gender identity in communication (Cameron 1997Cameron, Deborah 1997 “Performing Gender Identity: Young Men’s Talk and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity.” In Language and Masculinity, ed. by Sally A. Johnson, and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof, 47–64. Oxford: Blackwell.; Cameron and Kulick 2003Cameron, Deborah, and Don Kulick 2003 Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ). Moreover, one’s gender identity in communication may not correspond to the expectations socially prescribed to their biological gender role, an invariant concept determined by a person’s physical features, chromosomes, and reproductive organs. Instead, speakers may utilize their utterances to create a preferred gender identity, a fluid cultural construct and performative accomplishment (Butler 1988Butler, Judith 1988 “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal 40 (4): 519–531. , 1990Butler, Judith 1990 Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York, NY and London: Routledge.).

In the present study, the female judges employed the linguistic features which are culturally marked as masculinity to generate the male-like effect and gain as much respect as the male judges might in Taiwan’s patriarchal society. The female judges’ masculine-oriented communication style in the media discourse might be an attempt to create a social image to resonate with the contemporary social expectations of modern women in Taiwan. Since the 1970s, when the new woman movement started, the individualism-oriented images of women have begun to emerge in Taiwanese TV programs to cast off the given gendered stereotypes engrained in the traditional Chinese patriarchal culture (Clark and Clark 2002Clark, Cal, and Janet Clark 2002 “The Social and Political Bases for Women’s Growing Political Power in Taiwan.” Maryland Series in Contemporary Asian Studies 3: 1–39.; Ku 2008Ku, Yenlin 2008 “Feminist Activism within Bureaucracy: Process of Formulating and Implementing Regulations Governing the Protection of Women’s Rights in Taipei.” Women’s Studies International Forum 31: 176–185. ; Shaw and Lin 2012Shaw, Ping, and Chin-Yi Lin 2012 “Move Freely: Single Women and Mobility in Taiwanese TV Advertising,” In Women and the Media in Asia, ed. by Youna Kim, 130–142. London/New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. ). The female individualization movement has allowed women to pursue gender equality and independence in the society, liberated them from private domains, and given them the freedom to control their life choices and behaviors (Clark and Clark 2002Clark, Cal, and Janet Clark 2002 “The Social and Political Bases for Women’s Growing Political Power in Taiwan.” Maryland Series in Contemporary Asian Studies 3: 1–39.; Kim 2010Kim, Youna 2010 “Female Individualization? Transnational Mobility and Media Consumption of Asian Women.” Media, Culture and Society 32 (1): 25–43. ). The more masculine communication style of the female judges in the TV shows might be a media representation to express the image of new women in contemporary Taiwan’s cultural environment.

On the other hand, the concept of masculinity in the 1970s has also been redefined during the feminist movement. Unlike the traditional Chinese concept of masculinity, which advocates physical strength and power, new men have emerged and males are allowed to embrace their more feminine traits (Tan et al. 2013Tan, Yue, Ping Shaw, Hong Cheng, and Kwangmi Ko Kim 2013 “The Construction of Masculinity: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Men’s Lifestyle Magazine Advertisements.” Sex Roles 69: 237–249. ). Namely, the new men prioritize love and camaraderie rather than emphasizing the characteristics of assertiveness, dominance, and power. In the study of Peng (2006)Peng, Tai-Kuang 2006 “Construct Validation of the Bem Sex Role Inventory in Taiwan.” Sex Roles 55: 843–851. , it was noted that the ideal masculine image in contemporary Taiwan contains some feminine traits, such as gentleness, eagerness to soothe hurt feelings, tenderness, and sensitivity to others’ needs. Therefore, due possibly to the ideal mass representation of men in Taiwan has been changing, the male judges opted for the linguistic features which are socially characterized as femininity to create a social image of friendliness, benevolence, and caring and ultimately produced a culturally preferred persona of male authoritative figures in the media discourse.

4.2The hearer’s gender

Table 7 reveals that the advice comments addressed to the female contestants were more frequently redressed by giving encouragement (Example 2). In contrast, the advice messages addressed to the male contestants were often moderated by sweetener (Example 3), which can be the judges’ praise or approval. Although the judges’ advice was fundamentally for the contestants’ better performances, it involved the judges’ assumption of the contestants’ inadequate abilities and damaged the contestants’ positive face to a certain degree (Brown and Levinson 1987Brown, Penelope, and Stephen C. Levinson 1987 Politeness: Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ; Hutchby 1995Hutchby, Ian 1995 “Aspects of Recipient Design in Expert Advice-Giving on Call-In Radio.” Discourse Processes 19: 219–238. ). Therefore, the different distributions of sweetener and giving encouragement in the advice comments addressed to the contestants of different genders might be attributed to the male and female contestants’ varying perceptions of positive face loss and gender disparity in achievement-related characteristics of self-confidence.

“When interacting with others, individuals assume that each person has face, a public image of self, which consists of approved social attributes and must be continually maintained and protected” (Kendall 2004Kendall, Shari 2004 “Framing Authority: Gender, Face, and Mitigation at a Radio Network.” Discourse and Society 15 (1): 55–79. , 5). Earlier studies in psychology and applied linguistics have noted that men relative to women exhibit more aggressive reactions and experience a more significant threat to their socially constructed image by others’ negative evaluations (e.g., Bushman and Huesmann 2010Bushman, Brad J., and L. Rowell Huesmann 2010 “Aggression.” In Handbook of Social Psychology, ed. by Susan T. Fiske, Daniel T. Gilbert, and Gardner Lindzey, vol. 2, 833–863. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. ; Chen and Abedin 2014Chen, Gina Masullo, and Zainul Abedin 2014 “Exploring Differences in How Men and Women Respond to Threats to Positive Face on Social Media.” Computers in Human Behavior 38: 118–126. ; Seidel et al. 2010Seidel, Eva-Maria, Ute Habel, Michaela Kirschner, Ruben C. Gur, and Birgit Derntl 2010 “The Impact of Facial Emotional Expressions on Behavioral Tendencies in Women and Men.” Journal of Experimental Psychology Human Perception and Performance 36 (2): 500–507. ). Due possibly to the judges’ awareness of the male contestants’ greater sensitivity to their self-image, more sweeteners were inserted into the advice comments addressed to the male participants to minimize the negative impacts incurred by the advice and attend to the male participants’ face need in the media discourse.

On the other hand, the judges employed giving encouragement significantly more frequently to moderate their advice addressed to the female contestants than to the male contestants. Such a result might correlate to the gender gap in self-confidence, which is defined as “individuals’ performance expectancies and their self-evaluations of ability and completed performances” (Lenney 1981Lenney, Ellen 1981 “What’s Fine for the Gander Isn’t Always Good for the Goose: Sex Differences in Self-Confidence as a Function of Ability Area and Comparison with Others.” Sex Roles 7: 905–924. , 905). A prominent finding in the literature on confidence is that low self-confidence is a potentially debilitating problem among women working in various achievement settings across different cultural contexts (e.g., Carlin et al. 2018Carlin, Barbara A., Betsy D. Gelb, Jamie K. Belinne, and Latha Ramchand 2018 “Bridging the Gender Gap in Confidence.” Business Horizons 61: 765–774. ; Cold et al. 1980Cold, Alice Ross, Lorelei R. Brush, and Eve R. Sprotzer 1980 “Developmental Changes in Self-Perceptions of Intelligence and Self-Confidence.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 5 (2): 231–239. ; Corbin and Landers 1983Corbin, Charles B., and Daniel M. Landers 1983 “Sex Differences in Performance Estimates: Female Lack of Confidence vs. Male Boastfulness.” Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport 54 (4): 407–410. ; Daubman et al. 1992Daubman, Kimberly A., Laurie Heatherington, and Alicia Ahn 1992 “Gender and the Self-Presentation of Academic Achievement.” Sex Roles 27 (3/4): 187–204. ; Deaux 1979Deaux, Kay 1979 “Self-Evaluations of Male and Female Managers.” Sex Roles 5: 571–581. ; Frey and Ruble 1987Frey, Karin S., and Diane N. Ruble 1987 “What Children Say about Classroom Performance: Sex and Grade Differences in Perceived Competence.” Child Development 58: 1066–1078. ; Instone et al. 1983Instone, Debra, Brenda Major, and Barbara B. Bunker 1983 “Gender, Self Confidence, and Social Influence Strategies: An Organizational Simulation.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44 (2): 322–333. ; Lenney 1977Lenney, Ellen 1977 “Women’s Self-Confidence in Achievement Settings.” Psychological Bulletin 84 (1): 1–13. ; Lenney et al. 1983Lenney, Ellen, Joel Gold, and Chris Browning 1983 “Sex Differences in Self-Confidence: The Influence of Comparison to Others’ Ability Level.” Sex Roles 9 (9): 925–942. ; Lundeberg et al. 1994Lundeberg, Mary A., Paul W. Fox, and Judith Punćcohaŕ 1994 “Highly Confident but Wrong: Gender Differences and Similarities in Confidence Judgments.” Journal of Educational Psychology 86 (1): 114–121. ; Maccoby and Jacklin 1974Maccoby, Eleanor E., and Carol Nagy Jacklin 1974 The Psychology of Sex Differences. Stanford, CA: Stanford California Press.). In addition, women’s self-confidence can be lower, especially when they work or compete in situations where their achievements are compared with those of their male counterparts (Kamas and Preston 2012Kamas, Linda, and Anne Preston 2012 “The Importance of Being Confident: Gender, Career Choice, and Willingness to Compete.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 83 (1): 82–97. ; Lenney 1977Lenney, Ellen 1977 “Women’s Self-Confidence in Achievement Settings.” Psychological Bulletin 84 (1): 1–13. ; Niederle and Vesterlund 2007Niederle, Muriel, and Lise Vesterlund 2007 “Do Women Shy Away from Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 122 (3): 1067–1101. ; Vermeulen et al. 2014Vermeulen, Lotte, Elena Núñez Castellar, and Jan Van Looy 2014 “Challenging the Other: Exploring the Role of Opponent Gender in Digital Game Competition for Female Players.” Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking 17 (5): 303–309. ). Besides, studies have shown that when women are under stressful circumstances, such as in competitions, they are more likely than men to experience more symptoms of depression and anxiety (Bahrami and Yousefi 2011Bahrami, Fatemeh, and Naser Yousefi 2011 “Females Are More Anxious Than Males: A Metacognitive Perspective.” Iranian Journal of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences 5 (2): 83–90.; Chaplin et al. 2008Chaplin, Tara M., Kwangik Hong, Keri Bergquist, and Rajita Sinha 2008 “Gender Differences in Response to Emotional Stress: An Assessment across Subjective, Behavioral, and Physiological Domains and Relations to Alcohol Craving.” Alcoholism 32 (7): 1242–1250. ; Zuckerman 1989Zuckerman, Diana M. 1989 “Stress, Self-Esteem, and Mental Health: How Does Gender Make a Difference?” Sex Roles 20 (7/8): 429–444. ). Those negative psychological emotions are significantly associated with decreased self-confidence (Bitsika et al. 2010Bitsika, Vicki, Christopher F. Sharpley, and Kylie Peters 2010 “How Is Resilience Associated with Anxiety and Depression? Analysis of Factor Score Interactions within a Homogeneous Sample.” German Journal of Psychiatry 13 (1): 9–16.; Kang and Jang 2018Kang, Hyunwoo, and Seyong Jang 2018 “Effects of Competition Anxiety on Self-Confidence in Soccer Players: Modulation Effects of Home and Away Games.” Journal of Men’s Health 14 (3): 62–68. ; Reck et al. 2012Reck, Corinna, Daniela Noe, Jakob Gerstenlauer, and Eva Stehle 2012 “Effects of Postpartum Anxiety Disorders and Depression on Maternal Self-Confidence.” Infant Behavior and Development 35 (2): 264–272. ). Therefore, possibly due to the judges’ awareness of the tendency that women are more likely than men to lose confidence in themselves in the context of mixed-gender competition, they offered more psychological support by giving encouragement to the female contestants than to the male contestants while giving advice. By encouraging, the judges minimized the face-destructive effect potentially embedded in their advice opinions and helped the female contestants reinforce self-belief and reduce anxiety during the competitions. Furthermore, the judges’ words of encouragement, such as jiāyóu ‘cheer up’, pragmatically revealed their psychological support, benevolence, care, and concern to the female participants, who in general have a greater propensity than their male counterparts to seek and value social support and interpersonal dependence (Barbee et al. 1993Barbee, Anita P., Michael R. Cunningham, Barbara A. Winstead, Valerian J. Derlega, Mary R. Gulley, Pamela A. Yankeelov, and Perri B. Druen 1993 “Effects of Gender-Role Expectations on the Social Support Process.” Journal of Social Issues 49 (3): 175–190. ; Liebler and Sandefur 2002Liebler, Carolyn A., and Gary D. Sandefur 2002 “Gender Differences in the Exchange of Social Support with Friends, Neighbors, and Co-Workers at Midlife.” Social Science Research 31: 364–391. ; Thoits 1995Thoits, Peggy A. 1995 “Stress, Coping, and Social Support Processes: Where Are We? What Next?” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 10 (2): 57–79. ).