Chinese Gender Concerns

The research of gender language was first conducted abroad. As early as the 17th century, sociologists began to take into account the gender differences reflected in men and women's language, but it was not until the early 20th century that the relationship between language and gender actually became the concern of many scholars. In the 1960s, the establishment and development of sociolinguistics in USA provided the theoretical basis for gender language research, stimulating many linguists to conduct further research in this regard. In the 1970s and the 1980s, sociolinguistics was introduced into China, and gender language began to attract the attention from many Chinese linguists, but the research, centering around gender differentiation existing in English and its causes, was mainly conducted by Chinese researchers studying foreign languages. Gender differentiation also manifests itself in Chinese, as has been pointed out by some linguists. Therefore, in my opinion, it is necessary that we should pay more attention to the gender factors reflected in Chinese, probing into the gender differentiation reflected in Chinese, its socio-cultural connotations and pragmatic characteristics, for the sake of an all-round linguistic study.The body of the thesis falls into three parts:Part one offers a binocular vision of gender differentiation reflected in Chinese. First, the author analyzes the gender differentiation reflected in Chinese linguistic system from the following aspects such as phonetics, philology, vocabulary, grammar, rhetoric, etc., which is rated as static analysis; second, the author analyzes the gender differences reflected in men and women's use of language from such aspects as discourse style, speech acts, pragmatic principles and non-verbal language, etc., which is rated as dynamic analysis.Part two analyzes the factors that cause gender differentiation from the aspects such as biological features and division of social labor, acquisition modes and psychological features, power division and role relationships, and traditions and social prejudices, attaching importance to the social origins of gender differentiation in Chinese. First, man differs from woman in physiology, as forces man and woman take up different jobs respectively. So their social statuses are different. Such a difference will be inevitably manifested in language, resulting in the linguistic gender differentiation. Second, despite the innate physiological differences between man and woman, their thinking patterns, dispositions, behaviors, etc. are mainly acquired. In the process of language acquisition, the linguistic gender differentiation between them begins to come into being due tothe influence of linguistic environment. Third, in our daily life, every person has his own place in the social ladder, playing different roles, so "power" and "equality" may exert some influence in the communication between man and woman. Fourth, culture, to some extent, determines our communicative modes and behaviors, with language reflecting language users' culture and ideology, as is one of the important factors that cause the linguistic gender differentiation.For the third part, the writer attempts to make a study on the potential relations between gender and language from various angles, which will expand the research area of gender language. First, the research attaching equal importance to the difference and commonness: the difference between men's and women's speech is a type of sub-cultural difference under the mainstream culture; we are not only aware of the gender differentiation, but also the commonness. Second, the construction of gender in communication: gender is not a stable concept. In a sense, it is dynamic, constructed by communicators during their communicative activities; the research on the relationship between gender and language should be contextualized. Third, gender and verbal communication: Making a study on the stylistic difference between men's speech and women's speech and the gender characteristics of verbal behavio...