Gender Differences In Short Stories By Male And Female Writers

Language is a main way by which people comprehend the outside world and themselves. Discourse is applied language, so the choice of discourse way reflects different aspects of the close relationship between people and language.People can be divided into male and female, and language is also gendered. Male and female language is the reflection of the profound and complicated consciousness about gender that is embedded in and hidden behind a language. In everyday life, misunderstanding and even conflicts occur resulting from people's unawareness of this male and female language and the causes behind it. Therefore, it is of great significance to know about it and take full advantage of it.Gender difference is the hot subject since 1960's in the research field of linguistics. In western countries, the research can be traced back to the 17th century. Even as long as that time ago, people had already noticed the expressive differences in male and female utterances, but they paid no much attention and there was no relevant research outcome. It is at the beginning of the 20th century that the issue attracted scholars' attention in the true meaning. But the research during that period of time is not systemized, and the analysis of language data is only the loose discussion and personal observation and experience. In the middle 1960's, the development and prosperity of sociolinguistics provided methodology for the research of gender-related languages. The researchers took a quantitive method in their study and gave comparatively detailed descriptions of the differences in male and female languages, claiming that female language is more conservative. At the same time, the feminist movement which originated in America and then spread all over the world helped the research advance faster. Hundreds of popular and academic treatises have been published on language and gender in the United States. From 1970's to 1980's, linguists made further progress in the field, and they ascended to the social origins of the differences, and some of them figured out that the differences in the male and female languages had already developed into a kind of social discrimination towards women. While some other thought that there existed only slight differences in their languages. Anyhow from the late 1980's to the whole 1990's, the emphasis of theresearch is on the expressional forms and many a scholar used the theories, principles, and methods of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, philosophy and some other disciplines to probe into the various forms of differences in male and female languages. So on the whole the research of gender languages of this period is systematic.In China, the research of this issue begins merely in the late 1970's and early 1980's when scant attention was paid to gender-differentiated speech aside from language variation research, in which sex is an important independent variable. Studies, devoted specifically to issues involving language and gender were rare and the main concern is focused on the cultural introduction, comparative analysis and investigation of gender languages in English language. During that period of time, Chinese linguists observed the impact to language from the western feminist movement and they wrote articles to introduce the linguistic phenomena, which talked about mainly the forms of gender languages.However the above researches mostly take spoken language as their investigating data and moreover the descriptions are mainly stylistic. Written discourses are absent and in the Chinese linguistic literature the topic has been largely ignored. With the topic as the center, and based on a relatively systematic study and analysis of the differences in using written Chinese by male and female Chinese writers, the author tries to give a further description of gender research in language. It is hoped that it may help people to take proper attitude towards the phenomenon as well as develop awareness of it, so that people can have more choices of styles and skills to obtain effective communication and meet their various needs.The approach in this study is mainly qualitative and descriptive. And the aim is to describe the differences between male and female languages in written Chinese. The corpus is limited to about twenty-eight short stories selected from Stories Monthly { with fourteen by male writers and fourteen by female writers.According to the investigation, differences do exist in the male and female written discourses. Male writers and female writers are different in the choice of topics. They are in their own particular preference of choosing certain topics. Even in the presentation of the same topics as death, love and pregnancy, they embody their different understandings of the topics in the different ways of interpretation. Differences on linguistic level can also be found. And differences are found in narrative features too.This research of gender language helps to stimulate the combination and development of different disciplines and provides a broader vision for linguistic study of literary works. It has great possibility of flourishing. The author believes firmly that while people are attaching more and more importance to gender language, there will surely be a great breakthrough in the research and on the other hand this research will play a role in more and more fields.