The Resconstruction Of The Interpretation Theory On The Relationship Between Language And Gender And Its Empirical Studies

Social changes and feminist movement have given a spur to the study of the relation between language and gender, which, in spit of the rapid development, has left many problems unresolved ranging from its theoretic base to substantial analysis. The thesis is organized based on these problems which remain to be addressed.First, major theories put forth by previous studies include: deficit theory, dominance theory, difference theory, ethnolinguistic identity theory, and politeness theory, which have successfully explained some phenomena, but still fail to account for the issue wholly and effectively, so it is necessary to reconstruct a theory system, which in this thesis consists of two categories: exogenous and endogenous impacts. Exogenous impacts mainly include socialization, gender-schema, and social-structure, while endogenous impacts, biology, psychology, and cognition, and joint impact functions in between.Second, at the level of gender-differentiated language use in general, one dimension of context that has rarely been studied is the interpretation of speech. Here the author seeks to develop an increased understanding of gender differences in communication by asking whether gender impacts hearing as well as speaking. This line of inquiry will contribute to our understanding of speech as an interactive phenomenon. This research offers four findings: 1) Women and men frequently hear as well as speak different voices; 2) Women seem more sensitive than men to these different voices; 3) Some voices may not be gendered; 4) Social classdoes not affect peoples' ability to hear the voices. In this part, the study extends to a new-way communication, Computer-mediated Communication, and comes to a conclusion that even in such a seemingly genderless way, there is undeniably a gender difference in styles in on-line chatting: males are more prone to speak in an aggressive, competitive style, while women tend to be far more supportive. The male/female language style dichotomy has been transported into network communication.Third, at the level of sexist language use, the author clarifies the definition of sexism which is mainly directed towards women, the passive victims of social values and the male dominance. The author assumes that sexist language use can be represented at three different levels, from words to phrases/sentences, then to discourse, and in each part, new angles have been suggested, such as presupposition and inference, proverb and metaphor in the analysis of phrases, and transitivity choice and localization in discourse.At the end of the thesis, the author indicates that a lot more new phenomena will appear with the change of society and way of life, so the study on the relation between language and gender will continue.