A Study On The Gender Characteristics Of Chinese Cyber-language

The world-wide application of Internet has created a new communicative platform in modern society. At the same time, the Internet has deeply influenced our life in many aspects including technological innovation, cultural development and linguistic revolution. In recent years, cyber-language in CMC (Computer-mediated Communication) has attracted sociolinguists'growing interest. When the studies of gender differences in language step into a more systematic period, growing attention is paid to CMC discourses. However, most previous studies were conducted in English conversation. Although combined with previous theories on language and gender abroad, many Chinese researchers have explored under Chinese context, few empirical effort has been made on the cyber-language in QQ—the most popular instant messaging software in China. The thesis intends to investigate the quantitative gender differences in men's and women's cyber-language under Chinese context in QQ chatting. Moreover, what lead to these gender differences are exposed and discussed.The author chooses 12 items including 5 non-linguistic items and 7 linguistic items as variables to study the QQ online-chatting language. These variables are identified according to the communicative features in online-chatting (for example frequent usages of emoticons and catchwords) or are affirmed variables reflecting gender differences in other peoples'studies (see ZhaoRonghui 2003). 32 college students (16 females and 16 males) are selected as subjects and each provide a same gender chatting record and a mixed-gender chatting record. In this thesis, ICTCLAS, Wordcounter 1.1, SPSS 13.0 and Matlab are used in different processes to meet corresponding research requirements. At first, ICTCLAS is used to tag all Chinese chatting corpora (see 2.4). After that all frequencies of 12 variables in 64 different chatting logs are counted by Wordcounter 1.1 or Matlab. Run Matlab to standardize the value of those variable frequencies, and then code them into SPSS 13.0. In the end, conduct an independent T-test on the standardized data via SPSS 13.0 to compare the gender differences between men's and women's chatting speech. Besides, different accommodations reflected in mixed-gender online-chatting and same-gender online-chatting are discussed to discover how the audience's gender influences speakers'choice of words or language usages in cyber-communication.The results indicate that most identified gender difference (such as females use more polite expressions, adjectives and intensive adverbs etc.) in language in previous concerned studies can be affirmed but without reaching significant level in QQ online-chatting. However, in the aspects of using numbers, onomatopoeic words and revealing personal information, male and female QQ users have different features respectively. The cyber-language in male students'chatting logs contained more"female"stylistic features, while that in female students'turns to show more"male"stylistic features without so-called obvious gender mark. Besides, accommodation is obviously found between same gender chatting and mixed gender chatting in this study and same gender chatting shares more gender differences than mixed-gender chatting. That is to say, both men and women are able to accommodate male-preferential language and women-preferential language. What's more, men and women tend to be motivated to accentuate their similarities in mixed online chatting.The findings in this thesis provide a brand new perspective for the study of men's and women's language in cyberspace and imply that the traditional strict gender dichotomies in everyday conversation are challenged in cyberspace. Moreover, the results in this thesis show that the IM (instant messaging) system in CMC could help overcome certain barriers in cross-gender communication and enhance the understanding between men and women. Practically speaking, all findings on the gender characteristics of cyber-language could be exploited in many popular fields, such as distant education, online business and advertisement planning so as to maximize the full utilization of the Internet and improve the language efficiency of web information according to men's and women's different language features.