The Making Of Masculinity In Small Talk Of Chinese

Gender issue in language mirrors people’s perception and attitude towards gender, whichnarrates ethnic gender idea and value orientation as well. The obvious gender difference inlanguage use reflects in phonetic sound, intonation, vocabulary and conversational style.Different people take the choice of language content and its form as ways of making theirgender identity.The study will investigate how men choose language content and form meeting theirgender identity to make their masculinity of Chinese, based on the perspective of variationtheory and through ways of tape-recording and observation in everyday talk, andquestionnaire as a supplementary way is adopted. The data will be analyzed by Goldvarb Xfrom distributional analysis and multivariate analysis.It is conclude that gender identity is one of the significant parts of daily interaction. Bymeans of small talk, men conduct their expected gender identity and social gender charactersand realize the construction of gender ideology simultaneously. The features of men’slanguage are closely related to men’s ideal gender identity. They certain language behaviorshelp to produce and engender them. They actively make their gendered identity, and project aparticular gendered image they themselves intend to. There are two ways to make men’sgender identity, that is, forms and content. On the one hand, they make their masculinity byusing taboo language, more minimal response of competitive function, hedge with referentialmeaning and modal tag question. On the other hand, they control the choice of topics,stressing the gender of characters in the stories, emphasizing the achievement of thestorytelling, confessing their straight identity, homophobia, commenting others’ stories andbehavior, and avoid expressing vulnerability and self-disclosure.As a matter of fact, it does not exist essentially masculinity and femininity, but once thegender identity is given, the social regulation will make individual social gender regulationand expectation and force individuals to abide. There is common point that gender is notinborn but formed by practice in the process of adulthood, from mind or environment. Theconstruction of gender is a process. Everyone gains gender identity by gender study in eachaspect and participates this process to construct. Individual is the performer of gender identity construction. It is necessary to adjust verbal behavior and non-verbal behavior to be in linewith the standards of gender identity.