The Role of Gender in Chinese Textual Discourse

• Main Authors: Ling-hui Huang, 黃齡慧
• Other Authors: Raung-fu Chung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2000
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/52459840486255650361

碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 88 === Many studies have been conducted on the relationship between language and gender as well as literary works and the gender of the writer. However, few of them are designed to investigate the role of gender in textual discourse. Therefore, the relationship between written dialogues and gender is worth exploring. The present study was conducted to examine three issues: topic selection, language use and conversational strategies in written dialogues in the Chinese newspapers in Taiwan. The analyses were divided into two parts. The first part explores the relationship between the gender of the character and the three issues. The second part explores the relationship between the gender of the writer and the three issues. Thirty short stories with written dialogues were selected from four popular newspapers, the China Times, the Central Daily News, the Liberal Times and the United Daily to answer the three hypotheses: 1. Dialogue writing and natural speech have something to do with each other. 2. Gender stereotypes of men''''s and women''''s speech in Western society are also reflected in the dialogue writing in society of Taiwan. 3. There exist some disparities between men and women writers in terms of dialogue creation. Major findings of the study are divided into two parts and presented as follows: 1. In general, male and female characters exhibit more disparities than similarities in written discourse. A. Male characters are found to pay closer attention to such topics as women, sex, work and business, while female characters to daily life issues, family, children, men and love. B. Female characters use two specialized terms-ren jia (人家) and lao niang (老娘)-to address themselves, but men characters are not found to use any peculiar terms to call themselves. C. The result indicates that male characters tend to use tai (太) ''''too'''' and hen (很) ''''very,'''' while female characters use hao (好) ''''so or such.'''' D. Male characters use such expressions as hao ji le (好極了) "that was terrific" and tai hao le (太好了) "that was great" in written dialogues, but female characters are not found to use them. E. The major group of users of hedges are male characters instead of the presupposed female characters. F. Although characters of both sexes curse and use inelegant language in written dialogues, females are found to curse much more than their male counterparts. G. Finally, male and female characters are found to exhibit little difference in conversational strategies. Both of them prefer a more direct way of talking and almost none of them are found to talk in competitive manners in the dialogues of short stories. 2. Men and women writers show more similarities than disparities in the way they compose the language for their characters. In other words, characteristics of language composed for male characters appear identical in men and women writers'''' written dialogues, and so do those composed for female characters. Besides the similarities, men and women writers exhibit some disparities in composing speech for their characters. The results of disparities between men and women writers'''' are listed as follows: A. The first disparity lies in the topics they choose for their female characters-men writers stick to subjects that were previously considered "light" such as self, family and children, while women writers do not. B. The second disparity lies in the composition of self-referents and exaggerated expressions. Men writers compose specialized self-referents ren jia and lao niang for female characters but women writers do not; men writers compose exaggerated expressions for male characters but women writers are not found to do that. C. The third disparity lies in the use of tag questions. Women writers compose such expressions for female characters but men writers do not do it for their female characters. D. The last disparity lies in the creation of cursing words and sexual slang. Men create more such expressions than women writers do.