A Study Of Gender Difference In Blog Language

The present study, based on theories by Robin Takeoff and Deborah Tannen, is intended to probe into the gender difference in Chinese blogs, which are characterized by anonymity feature. It aims to testify these hypotheses that, there is gender difference in contextuality in Chinese blogs, the correlation between gender and contextuality in blogs is significant, and gender difference in contextuality in blogs is also statistically significant regardless of age, occupation, position, etc.The present study is a practical research based on blogs from two wellknown websites, blog.sina.com.cn and blog.sohu.com.cn. The samples consist of 208 articles on the same topic,"汶川地震周年", from 208 blogers by different authors, 108 male and 100 female. In order to make the data reliable, only the articles written originally by the single author whose gender can be assured are involved in this study.The samples are generated by software ICTCALAS3.0, software famous for functions of lexical division, part-of-speech tagging (POS tagging), named entity recognition (NER) and new word recognition. Then the data is analyzed by SPSS17.0 from three aspects, descriptive analysis, correlation analysis and Independent-samples T Test. And discourse analysis is applied in discussion of the results.The results generated from statistical analysis based on the practical study fully prove the three hypotheses. The results indicate significant gender differences on contextuality in blogs, which is consistent with previous studies, namely, male language is relatively formal and female contextual. The correlation between gender and contextuality in blogs is statistically significant. There are also new findings that females use more adjective, adverb, preposition, pronouns and verbs than males, while males use more nouns. What is more, the correlation between gender and adverb, noun, preposition, pronoun and verb is statistically significant.The results in this study prove that the theories of gender differences hold true in Chinese blogs. The new findings embody the differences between Chinese and other languages linguistically and culturally. All the findings indicate blogs, despite its special register, can not go against the nature of language. The findings will benefit the communication between male and female in blog identity.