The Interpretation Of Linguistic Sexism In Chinese And English With Cognitive Linguistics

This thesis is trying to interpret linguistic sexism in Chinese and English with cognitive linguistics. Linguistic sexism is the language representation that one sex member biases on or discriminates against other sex members. To a certain degree, language represents that men discriminate women. Language itself has no discrimination. But sexism in a certain society and ideology is reflected in language. Linguistic sexism is one of the most heated sociolinguistic topics. Traditional researches on linguistic sexism are done from the sociolinguistic theoretical perspective. The forming and developing of linguistic sexism is analyzed with social, cultural and historical views. The study on linguistic sexism includes linguistic aspects, social, cultural, historical and psychological aspects reflected by language. The previous researches always focus on the non-linguistic elements, and achieve great accomplishments. With the development of cognitive linguistics, some scholars begin to try to study the linguistic sexism from the cognitive perspective. But the researches are scattered. The cognitive model of language user determines language, and cognition is between the objective world and human being. Language does not exhibit the objective world directly. The cognitive model: reality-cognition-language shows that cognition is the inner mechanism of the linguistic sexism formation. The Prototype Theory of Categorization and the Conceptual Theory in cognitive linguistics can analyze the phenomenon of linguistic sexism in the cognitive view. According to the Prototype Theory of Categorization, owing to the men's prototypical position and the women's non-prototypical position, men locate in the center of the human society. This determines the principal position of men's language in Chinese and English. At the same time, women are on the margin of the society, belong to the non-prototypical members, and their language is on the margin and subsidiary position as a matter of course. The Prototype Theory of Categorization is cognitive argument of linguistic sexism. Many Chinese and English metaphors reflect sexism. The Conceptual Metaphor Theory can explain the phenomenon. The thesis uses the Prototype Theory of Categorization and the Conceptual Metaphor Theory to analyze linguistic sexism in Chinese and English, and finds that cognition is the basic reason that causes linguistic sexism.