社会语言学

An Analysis of the Features and Causes of Female Language

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Introduction:

The study of gender language has a long history. As early as 1922, Jens Otto Harry Jesperson has specially opened up a chapter of “ The Women” in his book Language, which discusses the language differences between men and women. Since the 1970s, some famous scholars such as Lakoff , Trugill and others advanced the study to systematize the study of gender study.

In recent years, the studies of “female language” are increasing in many magazines and books, which draws much attention. Many researchers have almost reached the same conclusion that women have their own language. Crosby and Nyquist got the conclusion from their studies: the so-called female language is not existed since women are born, but this kind of language reflects the people in the society always put the female in this position that is hard to change.

In our society, the female language is characterized by a lack of social status. In this paper, I will start from the features of female language, and simply discuss the factors of its formation.

I.The features of female language

Many observers believe that men and women are different in language communication. The female language exists in any language as a widespread phenomenon. Men and women have different choices in expressing ideas when they use the same language. For example, abstract nouns have gender differences in grammar, men call women as “ feminine”, while women call men as “masculine”. The education received by women is that they tone should be soft when they talk; do not refute others; be gentle and modest in language communication; avoid arbitrary or offending others; be aware of overconfidence. The features of female language can be summarized from following aspect：the choice of words, the choice of syntactic and pronunciation and intonation.

1.The choice of words

Both men and women have their partial words, which can be said that a considerable number of words have been given the label of “feminine” or “masculine”. Men don‟t use( scorned, unwilling to use) some peculiar words in female language that is “ feminine” words. At the same time, women also avoid the “ masculine” expressions. Women often express their feelings without control, they like exaggeration when they talk, so they have the following characteristics of choosing words:

1)Like using exaggerated adjectives, such as divine, charming, cute, gorgeous, heavenly” and

so on. Men sometimes also use these words, but they rarely use these words to express the same meaning in terms of tradition. “ What a divine idea!” obviously comes from a woman‟s mouth.

2)Like using some degree adverbs to emphasize, also like choosing some adverbs to strengthen

adjectives, such as “ so” “quite” etc. Lakoff( 1972) and Tarone (1979) prove that men like using “very” and “really” while women like using “so”.

3)Are good at using some color words, especially some rare color words, such as “ lavender,

magenta, aquamarine”.