A Study Of Women's Language Features In Lao She's Works In A Sociolinguistic Perspective

Lao She is remembered as a writer of realism in the field of modern Chinese literature. Lao She combines simple, plain, and natural language with a style of humor in most of his works, which won him worldwide fame as "a master of letters". His contribution to literary language and style finds itself an eternal life in the history of Chinese literature. Lao She, born in poverty, experienced the ordeal in his whole life. All these sufferings had great influence on Lao She's inner complexity and enriched the themes of his creation. Lao She grew up partly traditional and partly modern nurtured by Chinese and Western cultures. Lao She's views on women set a representative example for his contradictory thinking. This paper attempts to examine the images of 8 women characters from Camel Xiangzi, Beneath the Red Banner, and Mr. Ma and Son in respect of their speech and body language based on sociolinguistic theory. The 8 women are "Tigress", "Joy", "aunt", "sister's mother-in-law", "mother", "elder sister", "Mrs. Evans", and "Mrs. Wendell", respectively. The analysis is as follows: (1) to generalize women's distinct language features in terms of sentence patterns and choices of words employed in their speech, and to explain their uniqueness in language features as well as nonverbal behaviors from the aspect of social factors including age, occupation, class, sex, race, educational level, and cultural background; (2) to analyze and account for women's violation and observance of the interpersonal communication principles-"Politeness Principle" and "Cooperative Principle", two approaches of sociolinguistics along dimensions of social factors, speakers' psychology and personality as well. The author attempts to apply sociolinguistic theory to the actual practices in literary works and real life and hopes that the tentative work will be continued to further develop the study of sociolinguistics.