A Contrastive Study Of Linguistic Sexism In English And Chinese

Sexism is a universal phenomenon in society, which exists in different regimes and countries in varying degrees. As a pervasive phenomenon in society, it is reflected in the mirror of language, which is referred to as linguistic sexism. Although it represents as a linguistic phenomenon, it is actually caused by many kinds of ideological dross and outmoded conventions and customs settled in the culture for a long time, which reflects the discrimination against women in the society. In a broad sense, linguistic sexism refers to gender discrimination against both men and women. This thesis only probes into the study of linguistic sexism against women. This phenomenon, which can be found in both English and Chinese, refers to the expressive ways in language that unnecessarily differentiate between women and men or exclude, trivialize, or diminish women.According to the views of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, language is not only the product of society, but also affects people's thoughts and spirit constructions in reverse. People's observations, perceptions and explanations of the world are inevitably influenced by language. Before the middle of the 20th century, people's awareness of linguistic sexism remained perceptual and vague. In the west, the feminist movement in 1960s deepened people's cognition of gender difference in language and inspired them to study on linguistic sexism. At the beginning, studies of the differences mainly concentrated on words and phonemes used by males and females, later expanded to grammatical elements. In China, linguists did not begin to the study on linguistic sexism until 1980s. Studies in China are based on and originated from the study of asymmetry in language, which occupied a great proportion. Most of the studies start from the expressive ways of language, and indicate that words, phrases and expressions used by males are the principals and those used by females are the adjunctive variables.Globally speaking, studies in the relationship between language and gender entered into a systematical period and the research on linguistic sexism has progressed a lot. With the penetration of the research, people have realized the importance of eliminating linguistic sexism. Modern sociolinguists believe that linguistic sexism is a complicated social phenomenon, and it is also about language performance and in different discourse.The thesis adopts Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and feminists'theories as its theoretical framework and analyses the representations of linguistic sexism in English and Chinese respectively at the following linguistic levels: lexical level, syntactic level, semantic level and discourse level. Linguists mostly studied it at one level unilaterally; however, it is an extensive linguistic phenomenon, which is also concerned with language performance under different discourse. The thesis expands the research range to discourse level, puts the discourse into three kinds: formal discourse, less formal discourse, and informal discourse according to the degrees of formality, and presents the phenomenon of linguistic sexism under each discourse. Whereafter, the thesis conducts a systematic comparison of the representations of linguistic sexism in English and Chinese. Due to the language universality, there exist some similarities in their representations. Meanwhile, they belong to different classifications and language families and each of them has its own diversity. With the help of Prototype Theory, this thesis aims at explaining the causes of linguistic sexism from the aspects of cultural background, social division of labor and psychological localization. Finally, the thesis analyses the developing characteristics and forecasts the developing trends of linguistic sexism in English and Chinese, evidenced by their traces of development under the three kind of discourse, with one representative for each discourse: dictionaries for the formal discourse, magazines for the less formal discourse, and daily-using language for the informal discourse.The changing process of language is quite slow, which cannot be finished in one day or one night. As long as people have a full awareness of the representations of linguistic sexism, change the social ideology, and avoid using every word, phrase and expression that has formed the sexist usage of language, language can be purified and the harmony of language and society can be achieved.