Construction Of Gender Identities In Chinese Advertising Language

Language is a social phenomenon and plays an important part in social life. Language keeps on interacting with all kinds of social contexts. People's uses of language differ due to their different class, status, education, occupation, age, gender, ethnicity and so on. All these social factors are related to language variation and language variety. Language variation and language variety are reflected in the differences at different linguistic levels of phonology, intonation, grammar, vocabulary, habit of language use and so on. Gender is one of the most important social factors that do appear to be related directly to language variation and language variety, and the study of language and gender is one of the major topics of sociolinguistics. Many scholars investigated the relationship between language and gender from different angles and pointed out that gender differences and sexism do exist in language use. Numerous observers have described women's speech as being different from that of men at the levels of phonology, morphology, vocabulary, grammar and some others. Women pay much more attention to the accuracy of their speech. And their speech is more graceful, more implicative and euphemistic. Researchers also observe sexism in language use. Investigations into languages show that women in language are always with such semantic meanings as"subordination","negation","passiveness"and so on. Language co-varies with the development of the society. People's behaviors construct certain identities; and language, as a kind of behavior, constructs certain identity.As a variety of language, advertising language should not be studied without considering social factors. Gender differences and sexism also exist in advertising language. Advertising language is closely related to social factors and also co-varies with the society.The thesis, taking variation theory in sociolinguistics as its theoretical basis, explores the relationship between Chinese advertising language and gender. The study shows that gender differences do exist in Chinese advertising language. In recent years, gender language has undergone some changes due to the awakening of feminist consciousness, the improvement of women's social position, the progress of society and the change of social life. Reflection in advertising language of these changes is the decreasing occurrences of conventional gender modes and the increasing occurrences of new gender images. New gender images mirrors the change of the society and is the very reflex of the co-variation of language and society. Thus, we can make use of advertising language to construct new gender images to help eliminate sexism and promote gender equality in our society. The study can contribute to a better understanding of the interactive nature between language and gender and enrich sociolinguistic research.