英语专业社会语言学论文 socialinguistics

社会语言学论文

A Brief Analysis of Gender Differences in Language

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院系：外国语学院

班级：英语1101

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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.