A Descriptive Study On Gender Differences Reflected In Language

One major issue in the sociolinguistics of speech is the relationship between language and gender,which started to be researched on in the early 1970s in the United States, when women began to examine and critique societal practices that supported gender discrimination in consciousness-raising groups influenced by feminist movement initiated in the 19th century. Specifically, two domains of language behaviors were investigated: speech behaviors of men and women on the phonological level, and the interaction behavior (conversational styles) between women and men in discourse. The research studies on language and gender in China started at the beginning of the 1980s and developed quickly soon after the introduction of western studies in this field. A great deal of papers, articles and reports concerning language and gender both in English and Chinese were published in the past two decades, mainly focusing on the static studies: lexical differences, semantic differences, phonological differences, syntactic and stylistic differences. This paper is also based on such a framework, for the purpose of presenting a framework of thinking about the gender differences reflected in language use through the systematic static description of the lexical, syntactical, phonological and stylistic differences with references to the markedness theory as well as the interactional gender differences occurring in actual verbal communication, aiming to find some new perspectives in the observation and the explanation of those differences. Viewed from the structure pattern of this thesis, chapter one is a static description of the differences of speech behaviors of men and women on the lexical, syntactical, phonological, and stylistic level; chapter two demonstrates in details the gender differences reflected in verbal communication; chapter three explores the mechanism that may result in the actual differences in language usage between men and women. This paper also provides some vivid data and examples, working as supplementary materials, from existing literature. Sociolinguists who took great interests in the issue of Language and Gender always try to give some reasonable and convincing evidence and explanations as to how gender and language are related and what caused such differences. Some explanations are also offered here by the author in Chapter three, in the hope that those immature ideas can invoke more attentions still to be paid to this issue. At the end of the paper, EFL teaching is mentioned as a trivial example of the realistic application of L&G studies.