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the more polite form than men. That's to say, men use “Do X!” more often than women. So men always adopt this strategy. B. Positive politeness Positive politeness means to satisfy the hearer's positive face, to agree with the hearer's opinion and establish solidarity. For example, praise or respect the others. So this strategy is approach-based. The speaker always shows his/her agreement with the others. And it is more often used by women than by men. For instance, Holmes found that there were 80% of the people who use compliment in order to establish solidarity and agreement. Among them most were women (BAI Jie-hong, 2000: 110). On the other hand, men swear much more than women. They are more blunt and to the point in speaking (Wardhaugh, 2000: 316). Surely, men will threaten the hearer's positive face in this way. And they are more likely to neglect the strategy of positive politeness than women. C. Negative politeness The speaker acknowledges and accepts the hearer's negative face. In order to show this, he/she will not interfere with the hearer's affair. He will be modest, self-controlled, avoid showing-off and pay attention to the hearer's needs. So this strategy is avoidance-based. According to Brown and Levinson, the basic sentence pattern is the sentence containing modal verbs (HE Zhao-xiong, 2000: 18). In her analysis of gender language differences, BAI Jie-hong (2000: 18) found that females were more likely to use modal verbs, such as: can, could, shall, should, will, would, may, might, especially modal verbs plus other auxiliary verbs, such as have and be. It is because females are not certain about the environment around them;they are suspect of the environment. However, males always used fewer modal verbs. If necessary, they only use can, shall, will, which express certainty, authority and order. These meanings are surely contrary to the negative politeness strategy which needs the speaker to be tolerant instead of aggressive. From this analysis, we can see females are more likely to use this strategy. D. Off record In order to avoid the hearer losing face, the speaker use vague languages. Brown and Levinson showed 15 ways to do this, such as metaphor, sarcasm, hyperbole, rhetorical question, euphemism. In sociolinguistics, everyone talking about gender will mention tag questions. And many examples have been showed to illustrate females are more likely to use it than males. In reality, females like to use euphemism while males swear words. Both of these facts show obviously that women use off record strategy more often than men. E. Don't do the FTA This strategy is the most extreme one. That is not to make the hearer lose face by threatening actions.Sometimes the speaker even doesn't talk. After finishing an experiment, West and Zimmerman illustrated as following: The silences that were counted were those between the end of one speaker's turn and the first utterance of the other speaker. Silences were “charged to” the speaker who had just stopped speaking. Ratios were computed by dividing the total number of seconds of silence “charged to” the speaker with the least silence by the number of seconds of silence“charged to” the speaker with the most silence, if each speaker in the dyed had the same amount of silence charged to him/her, this ratio would be 1.0. In the same-sex conversations, this was approximately the case; all the ratios were between 0.6 and 1.0 except for one conversation between two ma