A Cognitive Analysis Of Linguistic Sexism In Chinese And English

Linguistic sexism has been a great and deep interest for linguists especially for sociolinguists both in China and in the west. They defined, studied and investigated the phenomenon of sex discrimination which was for the most part against women reflected in the aspects of pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar of a language. And they analyzed the reasons for this phenomenon on the basis of theories in sociolinguistics. In the late 1980 s, cognitive linguistics was brought up in which it was put forward that the creation, learning and use of language must and can be basically explained through human beings’ cognition, day-to-day experience of human beings is the basis of language use, and that language and general cognitive ability are closely interrelated, because the cognitive ability is the foundation of all the human knowledge. The fruitful achievements in this field have provided a new approach to further study on linguistic sexism. Based on the prototype theory and the cognitive metaphor theory in cognitive linguistics, the present study makes a cross-linguistic comparison on the representations of linguistic sexism in Chinese and English aiming to make a comprehensive and systematic interpretation of the linguistic sexism.The linguistic data in this thesis are mainly collected from Modern Chinese Dictionary, Oxford Advanced Learner’s English Chinese Dictionary and http://baike.baidu.com/ for their authority and comprehensiveness, with a reference of Analytical Dictionary of Characters, The Grand Dictionary of Chinese Language and English Etymon Dictionary. The thesis defines and introduces some related concepts such as “linguistic sexism”, “prototype”, “conceptual metaphor” or “cognitive metaphor”. And then it classifies, describes, compares and analyzes the corpus data of linguistic sexism in Chinese and English with qualitative method and comparison method of language. Findings of the study show that there is cognitive commonality between the causes of the linguistic sexism in Chinese and English. The cognitive set that taking man as the prototype of the human category is the direct agent of the origination of the fixed language forms implying sexism and the specific cognitive metaphor manipulation according to the cognitive set above pushes the semantic extending and shift of some word and expressions to the meaning of discrimination against women.At last, the thesis analyses the change and development and explores the amelioration of linguistic sexism attempting helping make language users aware of these discriminatory expressions and inspire language policy makers to take positive and effective measures, in order to improve language environment and social harmony.