A Corpus-based Study On Gender Vocabulary Under Chinese Context

Gender is one of the very important factors that will influence language use. The relationship between language and gender is becoming a very popular issue in the field of sociolinguistics. Besides those western linguists who have made research on this issue, some Chinese scholars have made some studies under the Chinese context. This thesis intends to investigate this phenomenon, find out the exact differences of the language use between male and female under Chinese context from the perspective of vocabulary and expose what exact causes lead to these differences. The specific statistic analysis on the language and vocabulary in this thesis was made from several perspectives by comparison: topic and word choice including expletive, exclamation word, and intensifier, weakening expressions, swearword and four-word structure. Lastly, the causes for the different language uses are explored on the basis of a comparison between some western conclusions and eastern reality from the following angles: historical context and social reality.The author selected 20 representative novels of 20 contemporary prestigious novelists in China and made them a research corpus, which is composed of 5196 Chinese sentences and near 200,000 characters, by gathering 150 sentences of both male and female from each novel. In addition, the author had had the corpus tagged in order to serve the research purposes of this thesis. With the help of corpus concondancer "Wordsmith" and POS tagger "ICTCLAS", the author is able to prove some previous study and get some new findings as well through a both quantitative and qualitative research on the vocabulary used by the male and female respectively. The new findings in this research are as follows: firstly, the female used no more interjections than the male. The female and male are significantly different in using "哩" and "哟 ". The most interjections used by the female is "啊" which is thought to be "呀 "in the previous researches. Secondly, as for expletives, the most frequently used five words by both the male and female are "了,吧,呢,吗, 呀 ". The male and female are significantly different in using "了" and "么".Thirdly, as far as the topic is concerned, the female pay far more attention to the family life than what we had expected. Fourthly, it is not found the male and female are significantly different in using the top 10 swearwords after the X2-test. Both the male and female like using "^ >, F^ %, ^ II". But it is found that the use of swearwords is closely related with the education degree. The uneducated groups used the most swear words. Fifthly, the male and female are found no significant differences in using the top 10 adverbs of degree as far as the total frequency is concerned. But the author found the male and female are significantly different in using the degree adverb "jt-'Mt is also found that the people with the highest education background ( Edu 1) use the intensifiers (adverbs of degree) most frequently. No specific profession groups are found more likely to use intensifiers. It shows there is no significant relationship between the intensifier use and the profession. Sixthly, no significant differences were found in using the four-word structures both in frequency and type. But men prefer to use those four-word structures which can well help them to show their personal power, superiority, wisdom, charm and ambitions. They care less about the details of life. And women, on the contrary, pay more attention to personal feelings, such as likes and dislikes, sympathy, freedom, children, beauty, face-loss and face-protection, beliefs of gods etc.The contribution of this thesis is to make an initial attempt to study the specific language differences between genders under the Chinese context from the perspective of lexicology. The thesis successfully compares the western results on the issue of gender and language with the new findings in the research. The originality of this thesis is divided into two: firstly, it provides a corpus study about language and gender based on specific statistic comparison; secondly, it carried out a research under the Chinese context. It is expected that this study will be useful for the sociolinguistic research by giving some figures and provide some implication for people's daily cross-gender communication.