A Study Of Gender Differences In Bowl Of Chicken Soup Afr The Soul

Language can be described as the living fossil that recording social life, themirror that reflecting society and the encyclopedia that studying social activities. Maleand female are the participants of social life and the society, therefore how male andfemale use different kind of languages to communicate in the society is undoubtedlythe common topic of the world. Gender differences in language have been studies bymany scholars all over the world since 1960s. Since Robin Lakoff raised the issues“women’s language”and“women’s status”in her book in 1970s, language and genderhas become a more and more important branch in sociolinguistics. Based on theresearch of previous studies, this thesis will study gender differences of male andfemale from the aspect of written language and analyze the reasons that cause thesedifferences. The corpus is limited to Bowl of Chicken Soup for the Soul (the 6thepisode) which is a classic reading material that has been read by more than 38million people all over the world.The approach of the study is the combination of qualitative and quantitativeresearch. Qualitative research means the corpus of this thesis is 34 passages chosenfrom Bowl of Chicken Soup for the Soul (the 6th episode), with 17 by male writers and17 by female writers and then gender differences in writing will be analyzed from theaspects of lexical categories, syntactic categories, semantic categories as well as thephonology and graphology categories. Quantitative research means the data analysisin syntactic categories. According to the investigation, gender differences do exist inwritten discourses, such as female writers prefer to use complex sentences,exaggerations and color words, while male writers tend to write simple and shortsentences and sometimes curse words will appear in their writing. As to the topics,Female writers’favorite topics are in the fields of family, children, cooking, the loveof couples as well as others that relate to private lives. However, male writers show a greater tendency in the fields of social life, sports and the association with others.This research of gender differences helps to stimulate the combination anddevelopment of different disciplines and provides a broader vision for linguistic studyof literary works. It has great possibility of flourishing. The author firmly believes thatwhile people are attaching more and more importance to gender language, there willsurely be a great breakthrough in the research and on the other hand this research willplay a role in more and more fields.