A Study Of Gender Differences In The Use Of Color Words In Chinese Prose

This thesis uses the correlation theory of color word to analyze gender differences in the use of color words in Chinese prose.Since the 1970 s,the study of gender and color words has become a hot topic in linguistics.Great progress has been made in the field of sociolinguistics abroad.The results show that women not only have a larger and higher quality color lexicon,but also behave better than men in terms of extraction speed and naming accuracy.Unfortunately,most studies are not conducted in the context of the Chinese language and culture.Researches on gender differences of color words in China started late,and most research contents and theories are based on foreign achievements.Studies on Chinese color words seldom mention gender factors,so it is necessary to discuss the relationship between Chinese color words and gender.Therefore,this thesis adopts a method combining quantitative and qualitative analysis to analyze gender differences in the use of color words in Chinese prose,aiming to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the differences in word form,word meaning and grammar function of color words used by male and female writers?(2)Why do the male and female writers differ in using color words?(3)How do the individual characteristics exhibited by writers that differ from group difference arise?By random sampling,this thesis selects 152 articles from four books,namely,One Hundred Years of Classic Proses(1917-2015)(《散文百年经典(1917-2015)》),Modern and Contemporary Chinese Proses(Vol.1,Vol.2),(《中国现当代散文(1976-2000)上、下》),A selection of Proses of Contemporary Female writers(《当代女性散文精选》),with a total of 1754 color words.Among them,864 color words come from 78 works of 72 male writers,and 882 color words come from 74 works of 55 female writers.In this thesis,the collected color words are sorted and analyzed,and the following findings are made:(1)Female writers preferred to use color words,and the formation of color words used by female writers was more flexible.However,both male and female writers were more inclined to use compound color words.Among compound color words,male writers use color words composed of adjective + color morpheme the most times,and seldom use color words constituted by noun morpheme + 色.However,female writers more often used color words constituted by two color morpheme mixed,and least used color words composed of noun morpheme + 色.(2)Compared with male writers,female writers were more willing to use color words containing vehicles.Male writers are more likely to use metal and natural scenery as vehicles.Female writers used most metal and food as vehicles.(3)Both male and female writers were more willing to use nominal color words to describe things.However,when modifying the same object,male writers tended to use them as attributes and female writers tended to use them as predicates.(4)There were two main reasons for the difference in the choice of color words by male and female writers.Among them,the physiological factor was the material basis,while the social factor was the main reason for the difference,including the traditional concept and the social division of labor.(5)In the process of analysis,the author also found that the phenomena of male feminization and female masculinization.Therefore,this thesis adopts a concept of gender-role orientation to make a reasonable explanation.This feature,reflected in the prose,showed that there is a cross phenomenon between male and female writers when they choose color words.In a word,by analyzing the gender differences in the use of color words in prose,this thesis provided an abundant corpus and a new perspective for the study of gender differences of color words.However,due to the limited space,the analysis is not enough.