Gender Differences In Conversation: An Empirical Study Of Netspeak On Campus Website

With the rapid development of information technology, the Internet hasirresistibly surged into almost every corner of people's life due to its economical,efficient, user-friendly and convenient hallmarks. The linguistic outcome of this is thenaissance of a new language variety– netspeak, which appears to meet therequirement of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). Since peopleincreasingly rely on CMC to exchange information and to communicate with eachother, and netspeak is enthusiastically welcomed by millions of netizens, the influenceof netspeak has already percolated into real-life communication. In recent years,netspeak has captured growing attention from linguists and sociolinguists. Althoughnumerous studies have been conducted on netspeak, yet gender differences innetspeak have been barely touched due to the anonymity of CMC. Nevertheless, thisobstacle can be overcome with the popularity of the Chinese Campus website, whosenetizens for most of the time register according to reality and log in using their realnames so as to contact their colleagues, schoolmates, friends and even relatives. Inthis dissertation, the author aims to check whether the findings from previous studieson gender differences in face-to-face communication can be appliable to describe andto account for the gender-related differences in netspeak, hoping that she cancontribute to a better understanding of language and gender in Chinese CMC context.To this end, 267 conversations, including 44 male, 66 female as well 157mixed-sex conversations between 498 netizens were collected from the Campuswebsite. Besides, the statements typed by male and female netizens in theseconversations were studied and compared in six aspects, namely topic selection,amount of speech, expletives, emoticons, final particles, and onomatopoeias, whichare considered to be able to signal the features of netspeak in this thesis.After analyzing these aspects, the author concludes that conclusions drawn fromstudies on gender-related differences in face-to-face communication are only partlyappliable to describe and to account for the differences revealed by female and malenetizens in netspeak. Despite the fact that men and women do display somedifferences in netspeak, these differences are subtle and statistically nonsignificant. To explain why the male and female netizens reveal subtle gender differences in netspeak,the author modifies and combines the previous theories on gender-relatedconversational differences and proposes a covariance model to explicate the identifiedgender differences in netspeak from sociocultural and psychological perspectives. Inthe covariance model, gender differences are considered to be dynamic and to covarywith the macro and micro contexts. Since in terms of the macro context, the subjectsinvestigated are growing up in a more open environment than the previousgenerations, and in terms of the micro context, the one provided by the Campuswebsite is apparently informal, and the communicators or the subjects are parallel ineducational level as well as in status, the male and female subjects reveal slightgender-related differences in netspeak.