| Hegemony has existed in language for thousands of years, the males are forever the law-makers, the narrators, while the females are the passive subordinates for good. Heiger has a famous saying: " Language is the existing homeland," but the homeland is an old one, with everything in it carries on the spirits of the ancestors, and all the words are embraced by the fixed definitions by the former generations. Today, females become "I"s, and want to protest against their fate of being discriminated, but they don't know where to start. Robin Lakoff said, " In order to change the image, females must start from language, for "You are what you say"." To their disappointment, they have no other choice but to build their own castles with the bricks marked with the male hegemony. Sexism is an old historical topic, but people who are pursing integrity and justice once held the unfair point of view for females, which caused the oppressed and submissive status for women for a long period of time. We can still find clues of sexism in the language nowadays. As a mirror of society, language both reflects social values and helps form social attitudes. It is one of the social areas to which biological sex difference has made its way. As a result, men and women are spoken about and speak differently. In human world, most societies are dominated by males and males' speech patterns are usually the prevailing ones. Consequently they have enjoyed sufficient academic attention while speech patterns of women are often ignored. Fortunately, this is experiencing a change now as a result of sociolinguistic efforts devoted to the study of sex differences in language use. Generally speaking, this study mainly focuses on language typically used to describe women and language used by women. This thesis is intended to explore sexism shown in the sex differences in English and Chinese, and show how social relations between sexes manifest themselves in languages. The whole thesis is divided into 6 parts. The introductory part briefly introduces the early studies and research on this topic, the trend and development now, and the starting points of the research of language and sex in English. Chapter One provides some basic background information concerning the topics discussed in the rest of the thesis, including some theories. Chapter Two focuses on linguistic analysis of sexism in English and Chinese with the former part on language referred to men and women. One achievement in sociolinguistics in the past few decades is that people find sexism exists in many languages including English and Chinese. It takes quite a few forms: the generic use of "man" and "he", the formation of words and characters, sex difference markers, word order, sexism in proverbs, cursing words, names and the semantic derogation of the words referring to women. In all these forms, women are often discriminated against while men are not. In English, the words referring to males are often used to refer to both sexes. "Man" is a typical example, it not only refers to males, but also refers to the whole human beings including females. As early as 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson announced in "the Declaration of Independence", "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal…". No doubt that "men" referred to people of both sexes, including men and women. The situation suggests that men are the dominators in the world thus ignoring the existence of women. In English, most words have no gender markers. When the sex of the referent is unknown, quite a few linguists maintain that the third person singular "he" should be used to cover both sexes, as in "He laughs best who laughs last". But in fact, evidence from some experiments indicates that the generic "he" is not always understood to include both men and women. Usually, when "he" is used in the generic sense, it will almost always be interpreted as excluding female referents. In Chinese, people often use "他"to refer to both sexes... |
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