Sexism In English Naming And Addressing Terms

Sexual inequality in language has captured attention of feminist linguists since the feminist movement in the 1960s. With the development of the study, linguists and feminists try to discuss the formation of sexist language and propose the strategies to eliminate sexism in language. But the significance and importance of this study have not been accepted universally. Some people hold negation and misunderstanding on it. Hence it is a long way to go to enhance people's awareness of sexist language and put forward more effective ways to reduce sexism in language.This thesis, indebted a lot to previous researches, attempts to make a systematic study on the sexism in English naming and addressing terms from the sociolinguistic and lexical perspectives, and methods such as classification, description and comparison are employed. It aims to reveal the sexism encoded in English language and further explore its formation.This thesis makes a study on sexist language through the analysis of naming and addressing terms based on the following consideration: naming and addressing terms play an important role in daily communication; it not only reflects social role, status and power of the participators in the communication but also contains deep cultural connotation. Hence it is beneficial to the study of sexist language in which male and female's status and relationship are influential factors. And the study on sexist language in naming and addressing terms is the innovation of this thesis.This thesis is based on a large number of language phenomena; therefore ways to collect reliable data and make systematic classification and analysis of them are very essential. Majority of the data of names come from the name survey of Bruce Lansky, who spent 10 years in accomplishing 20,000 questionnaires that cover 50 states in the United States of America. The data of addressing terms are from the observation and record of the dialogues and conversations in mass media including TV programs, newspapers and books. The author of this thesis makes qualitative and quantitative analysis of those data with high reliability from the aspects of morphological features, semantic meaning and asymmetry; and then classifies sexism in naming and addressing terms into three types: humiliation of female's image, peripherization of female's role, and subordination of female's status.This thesis also explores the formation of sexist language from the perspective of sociolinguistics. Physiologic differences between male and female are the objective existence, but it is not the determinant factor for sexual inequality. Dualistic categorization of human beings is more influential, because it exaggerates differences of male and female and ignores their resemblances. Besides, beyond the categorization, social gender evaluation and stereotype are another important factor.At the end of the thesis, the author discusses the possibility to reduce sexism in language through analyzing improvement of female status, enhancement of awareness against sexist language and academic support. The author holds the view that reduction of sexist language is the general development tendency of language, but it is a tough and long way. It requires more effective linguistic strategies, and efforts from linguists, teachers, and mass media, governments and legislatives. Specific strategies such as neutralization and symmetrization of naming and addressing terms proposed in the thesis are significant to reduce sexism in language, meanwhile helpful for people to correct use of addresses in daily communication.In general, this thesis not only helps people to achieve correct recognition of sexist language and its influence, and arouse awareness to struggle against it, but also provides theoretical support and practical strategies to reduce sexism in language.