社会语言学论文
A Brief Analysis of Gender Differences in Language
姓 名：何丽丽
学 号：201110010107
院 系：外国语学院
班 级：英语1101
指导教师：邓林
二〇一四年五月二十三日
A Brief Analysis of Gender Differences in Language
Abstract
Sociolinguistics is the descriptive study that concentrates on the study of how language is used, and the effects of language use on society. It also studies how language varieties differ between groups separated by certain social variables, for instance, ethnicity, religion, status, gender, level of education, etc. With regard to this paper, the emphasis will be put onto the differences in the actual speech of different gender. We can classify the gender differences in language into two categories. The first category is mainly about sexism in language, as for this category, we mainly focus on how speakers demonstrate their different cultural attitudes toward different genders. The second category is about the differences in the actual speech of men and women.
In the first part, I will make a brief introduction about sociolinguistics and gender differences in language. In the second part, it will concern the categories of gender differences in language and previous study of gender differences in language. The third part concentrates on the approach of the analysis. The fourth is about the data collection and research methodology. The fifth part analyzes the differences of the speech between men and women from three perspectives— the purpose of the speech, the topic of the conversation and the mode of the speech. The final part comes to the conclusion about the gender differences in language.
Key words: Gender differences, sociolinguistics, analysis
Main Body
1、Introduction
The knowledge of gender differences in language is very helpful for language learners, and gender differences may exist not only one but all languages. Men and women, on average, tend to use slightly different language styles. These differences tend to be quantitative rather than qualitative. That is, to say that women make more minimal responses than men is akin to saying that men are taller than women. The initial identification of a women's register was by Robin Lakoff in 1975, who argued that the style of language served to maintain women's role in society. A later refinement of this argument was that gender differences in language reflected a power difference. However, both these perspective have the language style of men as normative, implying that women's style is inferior. More recently, Deborah Tannen has compared gender differences in language as more similar to 'cultural' differences. Comparing conversational goals, she argued that men have a report style, aiming to communicate factual information, whereas women have a rapport style, more concerned with building and maintaining relationships. Such differences are pervasive across mediums, including face-to-face conversation, written essays of primary school children, email, and even toilet graffiti. Communication styles are always a product of context, and as such, gender differences tend to be most pronounced in single-gender groups. One explanation for this, is that people accommodate their language towards the style of the person they are interacting with. Thus, in a mixed-gender group, gender differences tend to be less pronounced. A similarly important observation is that this accommodation is usually towards the language style, not the gender of the person. That is, a polite and empathic male will tend to be accommodated to on the basis of their being polite and empathic, rather than their being male.
All in all, gender differences can be reflected in many aspects in our daily life, we should pay more attention to it, thus we can avoid many misunderstandings between men and women.
2. Literature Review
Categories of Gender Differences in Language
According to Wolfson, the research about language and sex can be divided into two categories. The first category is about sexism in language and the ways in which speakers demonstrate their different cultural attitudes toward men and women. Two areas of sexism in English have been well-studied. One is that females are excluded from mention in English because the generic he/man problem. Men are regarded as the representatives of all human beings and their speech is the standard, while women are seen as inferior and secondary in society. The second is that females are give negative treatment in society. Bad words in our daily is always related to female words. Female words are often used to insult a male, whereas male words are usually used to compliment female.
The second category is about the differences in the actual speech of men and women. The formation of these differences in language may have historical, physiological, social and psychological factors. Lakoff (1973) was one of the early articles to deal with the issue of differences in men’s and women’s speech. She has concluded six major characteristics of women’s speech: lexical choice, question intonation in statements, hedges which includes tag questions and statement modifiers which remove assertive force, emphatic modifiers and intonational emphasis, hypercorrect grammar and pronunciation and superpolite forms.
3. Theoretical Framework
The contrast analysis of male and female language in daily conversation concerns many aspects, such as the topic of the conversation, the mode of the conversation and so on. The differences of the speech between men and women may result from their conception of value, their hobby and their interest etc. They hold different opinions according to the same matter. So we can refer to the ethnography of speaking in describing the gender differences in language. Ethnography refers to the investigation of cultures using a particular methodology, that of participant observation. The ethnography of speaking proposed by Dell Hymes in 1962.
…The ethnography of speaking is concerned with the situations and uses, the patterns and functions, of speaking as an activity in its own right. (Hymes 1962:101)
This ethnographic framework takes into account the various factors that are involved in speaking. An ethnography of a communicative event is a description of all the factors that are relevant in understanding how that particular communicative event achieves its objectives. (Wardhaugh1998)
Conversation means to exchange ideas through interaction, so we can also employ the approach of interactional sociolinguistics—rapport talk proposed by Deborah Tannen (1984,1982) to analyze the gender differences in language. Tannen (1990a) has described the characteristics of men and women’s speech from nine dimensions: intimacy-independence, connection-status, inclusive-exclusive, relationship-information, rapport-report, community-contest, problems-solutions, novice-expert and listening-lecturing. From the description, we can conclude that women’s speech tends to be solidarity, yet men’s speech tends to be independent.
4. Research Methodology
There is a binary distinction between qualitative and quantitative research. Qualitative research is inductive, subjective, ungeneralisable, soft, process and verification oriented, hypothesis-driven, and hypothesis generating research, while quantitative research is deductive, objective, generalisable, hard, outcome and discovery oriented, data-driven and hypothesis testing research.
In this paper, I employ the quantitative and descriptive methodology to discuss the differences of the speech between men and women. Firstly, the characteristics of women and men’s speech are collected. Secondly, the differences are described through the collection.
5. Contrast Analysis of Speech of Men and Women in Daily Conversation
The speech of women differs from the speech of men in daily conversation. Men and women differ in the kinds of language they use because men and women often fill distinctly different roles in society. We can analyze the differences of the speech of men and women from many aspects, such as the purpose of the speech, the topics of the speech and the mode of the speech. Many of the differences may result from different socialization practices.
5.1 The purpose of the conversation
The purpose of the women’s speech is to establish the rapport relationship among the members in the community. They try their best to become a member of the community. They want to keep intimate relationship through interaction. So in their speech, the main purpose is to express their feelings and listen to others. The style of their speech appears more obedient and negative.
However, the purpose of men’s speech is task-oriented, they have a more analytical approach, so they try to solve problems and troubles through interaction. They seldom express their intimate feelings to others. They also want show their independence in the communication. So it is absolutely different from the purpose of the women’s conversation.
5.2 The topic of the conversation
The topic of women’s conversation is different from that of men’s. The topic of the women’s conversation mainly concerns social life, emotion, this can not be separated from their position, profession, social status, and personality. Women’s speech is regarded as trivial and gossip-laden because in the speech community of women, they mainly discuss clothing, love, family, trifles in daily life, experience, emotion, food and drink, life’s troubles. The purpose of the speech is to show the intimate relationship with the addressees, and through the speech they want to reinforce their membership in the community.
On the contrast, men show great interest in topics concerning business, politics, legal matters, sports, geography, economy and military etc., these aspects can reflect their solid position in society.
6. Conclusion
It can never be denied that gender differences do exist in all languages. Since women and women play different role in social life, they will definitely employ the different skills or methods in their communication or conversation.
Women’s speech is different from men’s speech in lexical choice, syntax and pragmatics in daily life. Like O’Barr and Atkins said, “women’s language ” would be more appropriately termed “powerless language”. It demonstrated to us that means this kind of language is less convincing, less intelligent, less competent, and less trustworthy, because women are more concerned about the emotion, intimacy, food, dress, relationship in conversation, they are always ready to share their happiness and sadness with people close to them or even strangers. However, men’s language is regarded as power because the controlling status in society, and what they are interested in is business, military, politics, sport and geography, they communicate with others in order to exchange ideas with them.
After learned the sociolinguistics as well as this brief analysis of the gender differences in language, I came to realize that, as a language learner, we should not only learn the basic knowledge about language, but also know the culture of the language. What’s more, I realize that the gender differences in language can never be neglected in language learning for the essential role it plays.
Reference
Nessa Wolfson. Perspective: Sociolinguistics and TESOL, Heinle & Heinle Publishers
赵蓉晖.《语言与性别：口语的社会语言学研究》.上海外语教育出版社
陈琳. 《英语中女性特点及其发展趋势探究》.《语文学刊》. 2010年第10期
杨永林. 《社会语言学研究》.上海外语教育出版社 2004
胡文仲.《超越文化的屏障》.外语教学与研究出版社
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