A Study On Gender Language Convergence In Contemporary Chinese Society From The Perspective Of Performance Theory

Gender language is the realization of the profound and complicated consciousness about gender, which is embedded in and hidden behind a language. As the society progresses, gender language convergences have occurred correspondingly. However, most of the on-going researches are conducted to find gender language differences. Thus, it is high time to study gender language convergence phenomena in contemporary China.The study in this dissertation is conducted by six criteria under stylistic analytical framework on lexical level and syntactical level, which have been localized in Chinese language background in order to answer what are the gender language convergences and their possible causes in contemporary Chinese society, and whether there are gender language convergences in all social classes. In order to have a well-control of other social variables and to reduce the influences that those variables may lay on the results as much as possible, the author classified the testees in this dissertation into 3 groups according to National Industrial Partition Theory. The research materials in this dissertation are collected from 4 real mediating and interviewing programs and 1 interviewing memoir. Apagoge is employed in this dissertation and the collected data on all six criteria are testified to see if there are significant gender language differences in all three groups.Conclusions are drawn accordingly. First, gender language convergence phenomena do exist and can be found in all three groups. Second, the degree of gender language convergence in three groups is not balanced. The author then interpreted the findings under the guidance of Performance Theory and made explanations to the results from both external factors and internal factors. The author stated that due to the changes of social labor division, social rights, social aesthetic taste and personal psychological status, the language convergence phenomena occurred. But as differences of other social variable are inevitable, the degree of gender language convergence is not balanced among all social classes. Furthermore, limitations of the research and further research framework are also discussed in the thesis.