Gender Mark Asymmetry Phenomenon In Russian Language

Language is not only a symbolic system,but also a social phenomenon.Language doesn’t come into existence or develop independently,but instead its internal elements are closely associated with social culture and other factors.Language is a mirror of the society,and meanwhile language can influence people’s way of thinking.There is no doubt that in real life people are divided into male and female.As the carrier of the social culture,language can reflect the complex gender culture in its unique way.As gender differences exist extensively in language,to study the relationship between gender and language is in effect to study gender culture’s reflection in language.Since the 1960s,with the rapid development of the Western feminist movement and the emergency of the postmodernism,a new discipline has formed in the field of humanities and social sciences-gender linguistics.As a new interdiscipline,the issue of the language and gender has drawn close attention from the linguists.What’s more,the Markedness theory in structural linguistics has opened up a new way for analyzing the relationship between language and gender.The Markedness theory can reveal the phenomenon of gender asymmetry in language,help us find the social and culture causes behind it.As a result,it will enrich the content of gender research.In this paper,we have reviewed the history of gender language studies;analyzed the specific forms of the gender asymmetry in Russian,using as the corpus Russian words and idioms;tried to explore the social and culture causes behind the asymmetry;and suggested that we should treat rationally the phenomenon of gender asymmetry in language.The research of the gender mark asymmetry phenomenon in Russian has important theoretical and practical significance.By analyzing the Russian gender mark asymmetry,we can not only improve the understanding of this phenomenon,but also extend the Markness theory’s application.Furthermore,the results of the research can be applied to the Russian teaching practice.Specifically,they can help students master the language norms in intercultural communication and construct a harmonious language environment.The innovation of this paper lies in that it combines the Markedness theory and gender language studies to study the manifestations of gender asymmetry at different language levels.This paper consists of introduction,the main parts of four chapters,the conclusion and references.In Introduction,the reasons,object,objectives,main tasks and methodology of the study are clearly stated.The study’s innovation and practical significance are also pointed out here.Chapter Ⅰ reviews the history of the gender language studies,discusses the general situation of the gender language studies in China and abroad,and summarizes the basic characteristics of the gender language studies in China and in Russia.Based on the Markedness theory,Chapter Ⅱ mainly analyzes the gender mark asymmetry phenomenon in Russian at the lexical level.In this chapter,we have studied the formal marking of nominal words and Russian names,demonstrated that masculine and feminine forms and word order of nouns,numerals,and pronouns are asymmetrical in distribution.At the same time,the phenomenon of in-equivalence between marked and unmarked items are analyzed from the aspects of semantic restriction,semantic orientation inference and semantic field.In Chapter Ⅲ,we take Russian idioms as the research object,group idioms about human beings into five categories according to their meanings.Besides,we demonstrate the gender mark asymmetry phenomenon from the aspects of the respective numbers of idioms that reflect man and woman,the order of words and semantic orientation inference and so on.Chapter Ⅳ further probes into the causes of gender mark asymmetry phenomenon in Russian,and analyzes the cognitive factors,economic factors,religious and social psychological factors.In the conclusion part,the main opinions and research priorities of the paper are summarized.Based on that,we raise several issues in the gender asymmetry research that can be solved by future studies.