Gender Differences In English Of The 19^th Century

Language and culture depend on each other for existence, and they reflect various conceptions of society. Just as males and females are different physiologically, psychologically, and socially, they are also different linguistically. In daily life, misunderstanding and even conflicts occur because of people's unawareness of these differences between male's and female's language and the causes behind them. Therefore, it is of great importance to know about them and take full advantage of them.In western countries, the research of gender differences 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 did not pay due attention to them and there was not much relevant research literature left behind. Until the 1960s, with the rising of feminist movement in America, gender differences in language became a hot issue in the field of linguistics. A great number of popular and academic works on language and gender were published in the western countries. But most researches in the past take spoken language as their investigating data. In the author's opinion, we should also take data from novels and study the"purified language"in them. This is because novels are the artistic reflections of social lives and also of the writers'mind. The conversations between characters can reflect characteristics of the contemporaries in using language. Therefore, we can find plentiful examples not only from the social reality, but also from the novels. In this thesis, the author will analyze the differences in English between male and female of the19th century novels.The method adopted in this thesis is corpus analysis. Most of the examples in this thesis are from Pride and Prejudice,Jane Eyre and Emma. Firstly, from the aspects of linguistics and pragmatics, the author analyzes some conversations between male and male, female and female, male and female in these novels, and illustrate there are differences between male's and female's language. Then, she introduces some possible explanations of the gender differences in language and expresses the author's opinion. At last, we can get a conclusion that knowing the differences well can help us communicate better with the oppositesex.As a young sub-field of sociolinguistics, gender differences in language analysis are attracting more and more attention from scholars in and outside linguistics. Scholars in the western countries now take the lead in this field. In China, the research of language and gender began merely in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and most of the publications were only introductions of achievements by scholars in other countries. There were only a few researches in Chinese relating to this study. This thesis is expected to arouse people's interest in the differences in gender language. The purpose of the study on the relationship between gender and language is to help people communicate better. Only after we have understood the different ways of communication between men and women, can we reduce the possible misunderstandings in interaction.