Gendered Contrastive Analysis of Relational Acts in Chinese Live Streaming E‐Commerce Discourse

ABSTRACT As a burgeoning e‐commerce mode, live streaming e‐commerce has attracted substantial academic attention, yet linguistic exploration remains notably scarce. Drawing on data from Taobao Live, this study employs a pragmatic approach to explore streamers’ language practices, with a specific focus on how gender roles shape their discursive strategies. Analyzing relational acts, it conducts a contrastive analysis of linguistic patterns between one male and one female streamer. The findings reveal that while both streamers employ transactional‐promotional and interpersonal‐constructional relational acts extensively, significant gendered divergences emerge in their strategic use of act types. This research not only deepens our understanding of streamers’ pragmatic behaviors in live commerce but also contributes to gender and language studies by providing empirical evidence of gendered language use in Chinese e‐commerce contexts, thereby bridging a theoretical gap in pragmatic variation research.