Study Of Gender Marked Asymmetric Phenomenon

Lyons classified markedness into formal marking, distributional marking and semantic marking. According to this way of classification on markedness, with the basic principles of markedness theory, this article mainly discusses the pair words which have sex markedness and which show the symmetric and asymmetric phenomenon of sex markedness. This article also discloses that, in the system of language vocabulary, this asymmetric phenomenon of sex markedness, at a great extent, reflects the ethnic cultural value and the images and characteristics of both sexes in the specific culture. But this reflection has its limitation. Different scholars have different opinions on what this asymmetric phenomenon of sex markedness really reflects. Author of this article furtherly analyzes the ideas of part scholars nowadays and put forward the suggestion on how to look at the asymmetric phenomenon of sex markedness in language system in a correct way.