A Sociolinguistic Contrastive Study on Gender Language of Korean and Chinese Speakers
This thesis aims to inquire into the current gender culture and gender awareness between Korea and China, by sociolinguistically contrasting and analyzing the gen...
A Sociolinguistic Contrastive Study on Gender Language of Korean and Chinese Speakers
This thesis aims to inquire into the current gender culture and gender awareness between Korea and China, by sociolinguistically contrasting and analyzing the gender speech acts of the speakers from the two countries. This study addresses the "gender different language" aspect of gender language study, and is more focused on language performance, rather than language form or system
Existing gender language studies generally deal with gender language as "male or female" language in a static and dichotomous way. In agreement with Butler's "Gender Performativity" theory (1990), gender is viewed as a flexible concept in this . In regard to the language performance of one person, gender is more important than their biological sex. So gender speech acts are performed by the speakers selectively through a series of social, cultural, psychological process in the specific context of communication.
The speech data was collected through the TV Reality Shows, and the analysis focused on compliment, request, and refusal speech acts. The data from corpus collected was processed by statistical analysis. We then calculated the distribution and frequency of the use of gender speech act markers from the three speech acts. In addition, sex of the listener, social distance and the relative power between the speaker and the listener, were considered as variables that affect the language performance of the speakers, and were used in further detailed analysis of the context. At last, Chapter 6 compared the differences of the use of gender speech markers from Chinese and Korean speakers, and the analysis results were interpreted with a consideration of the speakers’ sociocultural background.
Through analysis, we observed that both Korean and Chinese speakers use gender speech act markers of the opposite sex strategically and based on specific situations. And we can concluded that 'linguistic androgyny'phenomenon has occurred both in their languages but nevertheless specific appearances of them are different. With regard to Korean speakers, the feminization of Korean male's language was obvious. By contrast in the case of Chinese speakers, 'masculinization’ phenomenon of female language was more evident.
The root cause of 'linguistic androgyny' which exists in both China and South Korea is the changing sex awareness of people. The changes in families, education environment, and guiding role of the media, etc, may be the direct elements that caused this change. All in all, under current trends in language or other topics, the perspective that divides 'male' and 'female' into two absolutely will be not desirable.
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