Research On Relevance Of Language Use To Gender And Age In BBS

Language development is closely related to the development of human society. However, the early language studies regarded language as an isolated entity, neglecting its connection with the society. Not until 1960s did the scholars start to lay emphasis on the relationship between language and social development. Sociolinguistics started when W. Bright put forward his co-variation theory and Labov built a series of theory based on his research in New York stores.The previous studies have been mainly focused on the similarities in the use of language by the people of similar social background. This study takes the other way around in order to study whether such social factors as the gender and age can be worked out from the language uses.BBS is a newborn platform for language communication where people can express themselves in fake identities after registering. This paper chooses BBS as the study subject for two reasons. One is that the language and the texts in BBS are up-to-date. The other is that the characteristics of BBS fit the present research purpose.The paper inspects two issues. First, when the gender and age of language users are unknown, is it possible to figure out the real information related to language users' gender and age from their language uses? Second, which social factor is easier to be recognized, gender or age? Considering the convenience of data collection and questionnaire distribution, the author chooses the data from the most popular Chinese forum WWW.TIANYA.CN.To inspect the above two issues, the writer designed a questionnaire consisting of 30 multiple-choice questions and 3 true-false questions. Multiple-choice questions are extracted from the comments in BBS and the choices are the gender and age of the language users. The true-false questions are designed to test the validity of the questionnaire. Due to the limitation of the research conditions, this paper is only a sample study. Considering the subjects who have studied the theories of sociolinguistics may be more sensitive, the writer divides the subjects into the professional and unprofessional groups,30 members in each group. The professional group consists of the graduate students who have been taught sociolinguistics while the unprofessional groups involve the people chosen randomly.With the help of SPSS, this thesis explores the relevance degree between language forms and social factors. In concrete, the experiment tries to find out if speakers'gender and age can be recognized through their language uses by analyzing the confidence intervals of the data collected.The statistics show that there are 17 questions in the professional group and 14 questions in the non-professional group which get the lower bounds more than 0.5. But as far as age is concerned, the result is not optimistic. No questions in the professional group obtain the value of the lower bounds over 0.5, while in the non-professional group, only 3 questions over 0.5. The total correct answers are 621 and 585 in the two groups respectively. So the confidence intervals are (0.225,0.575) for the professional group and (0.288,0.645) for the non-professional group. Based on the data analysis, we can prove that gender can be recognized through one's language uses but it is difficult to work out the age of a language user.It is also found that when people guess the social background information about the language users, the traditional values held by the people influence the people's judgment greatly.The paper consists of five chapters. The first chapter introduces the origin, significance and purpose of the research, and summarizes the outline of the paper. The second chapter gives an overview of the formal achievements domestically and abroad. The third chapter elaborates the methodology of the research, including the questionnaire design, the choice of the subjects, the release and collection of the questionnaire, etc. The fourth chapter analyzes the collected data and discusses the results. The fifth chapter draws a conclusion, points out the main findings, limitations of the research as well as suggestions for further study.