A Contrastive Study Of Sexism In English And Chinese

Language is an indispensable part of social culture system. Saussure once saidthat to analyze language is to analyze social phenomena or to study the social impactof substances. Therefore, the ubiquitous sexism against females in society isnecessarily mapped through the special tools-languages which becomes one of thereasons why a mass of social linguists study assiduously on this topic.Chinese and English are two different families of languages in different cultures,therefore, the existent sexism against females in both China and western worldmanifests their own distinguished features, which possesses similarities anddifferences. This thesis tries to reveal the sexism in English and Chinese in overt andcovert ways. Comparing the similarities and differences of sexism in English andChinese, this thesis analyzes the motivations from the standpoint of cognitive modelas well as social model and then puts forward some possible strategies to avoidsexism and achieve linguistic equality in the end. The objective of this thesis is todeepen the cognition of sexism in languages for human kind; to lessen the negativeinfluence of sexism for people’s cognitive and thinking patterns; to do the author’s bitfor the future harmony society with equal rights for females and males as well as thefurther research on this realm.This thesis is composed of seven chapters.Chapter one is the introduction of the theme which distinguishes the concept ofsex and gender, gives the detailed definition of sexism and the classification of sexismin language and then indicates the purpose and significance of the study theoreticallyand practically. Chapter two is the literature review on the theme, which is from theperspective of the main researches and findings on sexism in languages abroad andhome, and then it demonstrates the shortage of the previous research on sexistlanguage, which becomes the reason why the author chooses this topic. Chapter three and chapter four chiefly illustrate the overt sexism and covert sexism in English andChinese respectively. More specifically, the overt sexism on word formation whichincludes etymology, suffixes and characters, word order, addressing terms consistingof kinship and social addressing terms, and semantic derogation in English andChinese is demonstrated on chapter three. Based on the abundant linguistic data,chapter four points out that covert sexism exists in proverbs of English and Chinesewhich integrate the ontological metaphor “WOMAN IS A GHOST; MAN IS AHERO” and orientitional metaphor “MAN IS UP; WOMAN IS DOWN”. Chapterfive and chapter six are the main parts of the whole thesis since they contrast thesimilarities and differences on sexism between English and Chinese, and they shedlight on the motivations for those similarities and differences, which assists theobjective of the thesis to accomplish in the end. The last chapter comes to theconclusion and the major findings, some enlightenment of those findings and thelimitations of this thesis are also included in this part.