A Contrastive Study Of Gender Differences In Chinese And American Weblog Language

As the two main social groups, male and female have differences in many aspects. Because of the social, cultural, customary factors and many other reasons, men and women also show some differences in language use, such differences are called gender differences in language, or differences in gender language, or linguistic gender differences. The study of gender differences in language is not only a main feature of linguistics but also a unique characteristic of sociolinguistics which sets it apart from other linguistics. Up to now, the study on language and gender has been involved in many subjects such as psychology, sociology, communication and applied linguistics.As the greatest invention of the 21st century, the Internet has brought an earth-shaking change to people's life throughout the whole world. Weblog (blog) which started in 1997 has also been developing fast since it entered China. As the latest form of Computer-Mediated Communication, weblog has attracted wide attention and welcome because of its advantages: the convenient access and operation, the quick and smooth communication with people worldwide, and the high degree of freedom to express one's opinion. The specificity of weblog aroused discussion among western linguists on whether there are gender differences in weblog language and many relative researches have been done.However, throughout previous studies on gender and language, most of them have been carried out within the English world; while few studies could be found in Chinese academic field, let along studies which combine Chinese and English corpus together and make comparison under different cultures. To fill the gap, on the basis of gender differences analysis, a comparative analysis was also made, taking totally 60 Chinese and American blogs (15 blogs were written by Chinese females, 15 by Chinese males, 15 by American females and 15 by American males) as corpus. For precision, all of these sample blogs were selected randomly from Chinese and American websites. To achieve the purpose of this study, several hypotheses were provided: 1) There are gender differences in choosing topics in both Chinese and American weblogs and they are caused by certain reasons.2) There are gender differences in using intensifiers in both Chinese and American weblogs and they are caused by certain reasons.3) There are gender differences in using taboo words in both Chinese and American weblogs and they are caused by certain reasons.4) There are gender differences in using emoticons in both Chinese and American weblogs and they are caused by certain reasons.5) There are gender differences in using sentence types in both Chinese and American weblogs and they are caused by certain reasons.6) There are differences in gender languages between Chinese and American bloggers of the same sex and they are caused by certain reasons.From this study, it is found that gender differences do exist in Chinese and American weblogs from the perspectives of the choice of topics, the use of intensifiers, taboo words, emoticons and sentence types. Moreover, due to some cultural and social factors, there exist some differences in gender languages between Chinese and American bloggers of the same sex. For example, on the choice of topic, both Chinese and American females prefer personal diaries, and their topics are concentrated on love, friendship, family, which are closely related with individual affaires, while topics that attract males are those related to politics, society and sports. In addition, there are more topics concerning personal love in American weblogs than Chinese ones, and more topics concerning family in Chinese weblogs than American ones. On intensifiers, both Chinese and American females use more intensifiers than males, but Chinese females show an advantage over American females according to proportion. On taboo words, Chinese males obviously use more taboo words than females, while in American ones, females seem to use even more taboo words although the two genders show a roughly average use of these words. On emoticons, both Chinese and American females use emoticons more often than males. But Chinese males use much less emoticons than American males. On sentence types, Chinese and American females both show a preference on exclamatory and interrogative sentences, including short exclamations and tag questions, whereas males tend to use more declaratives. What's more, on the use of exclamations and interrogatives Chinese females also contribute a larger proportion than American females.This thesis has proved the results in previous study to some extent, and reasons that cause various differences have also been analyzed in detail. At the final part of this thesis, some suggestions were provided, which are supposed to offer implications on the research of weblog language, cross-cultural communication and the teaching and learning of both Chinese and English language.