1、 1 Literature Review A Study on Sexism in English Language from Linguistic Perspective Sexism refers to the discrimination based on genders, especially the discrimination against females. Sex discrimination has a great influence in many aspects on our social life. Among all of those, the languages w
2、e use every day are ones that are most deeply influenced by sex discrinimation. English, as an ancient and widely used language, gives us a lot of evidence for its sex discrinimation agaist females. From Dai, Yuelans essay Sexism in English I get a very clear idea about the definition of sexism. Sex
3、ism in English refers to the sex bias in the widely used languageEnglish. Many people make an effort at speaking and writing English today in order to avoid using language which supports unfair or untrue attitudes towards a particular sex, usually women. However, there are still lots of sex discrimi
4、nations in existence around our daily life. Most of the language speakers have never noticed that they are using a language which is related to sexism. This study is going to do a detailed research on the topic of sexism in English from linguistic perspective. Sexism is not something existing only i
5、n English or any other languages, and it exists in peoples minds. Talking about the reasons and various phenomena of sexism in English language, many experts pay lots of attention to that. Gan Xiaodan in the essay A Brief Analysis on Sexism in English gives us her idea about the reasons of sexism in
6、 English language. In her thesis, the writer pays attention to the reasons and various phenomena of sexism in English language. There are two reasons for the existing of sexism in English. Fristly, men has advantages in physical ability and power which enable them to gradually gain dominance in poli
7、tics, economy and culture. Secondly, language is an important part of human culture, It wont be exaggerated to say that sexism was born with Eve being made of a rib taken from Adam, a symbolic event which seems to declare males absolute dominance since the creation of the human race. The whole human
8、 race form a stereotype that men are superior to women and deserve more privilege, which should be embodied in all parts of human culture, 2 including language. I find the same viewpoint in Jing,Liangliangs essay A Comparison of Sexism between Chinese and English. He takes the story from the Bibble
9、about how Adam takes one of his bone to build Eve, the first woman in the world. I am also greatly inspired by what Jing Liangliang writes in the essay A Comparison of Sexism between Chinese and English . In this essay, he talks about sexism reflected in English expressions. Take the order of words
10、as an example, males are put in front of females in most cases, “boys and girls” “man and woman” “husband and wife” “Mr. and Mrs.”, there are so many cases that prove Jing Liangliangs idea. On the contrary, maybe “ladies and gentlemen” is the only example we can find in which female comes in front o
11、f male. What he talks about the characteristics of words inspires me a lot. According to what he writes in the essay, although the popularity of female seems equal to the popularity of male, the words representing male occur more often than the words representing female, and the ratio is about 4:1.
12、The data is really surprising and usually it is ignored by most of us. When we read the sentence “he who laughs last laughs best”, we would not ask others why the sentence is not “she who laughs last laughs best”. Thats why we say language itself has sexism, and thats why we need to study on it. Acc
13、ording to how sexism is reflected in English from linguistic perspective, Alleen Pace Nilsen gives me a lot of advice in Sexism and Language, which is still one of the standard reference works on the subject. In this essay, she examined the ways in which the language in various childrens books encou
14、raged sexism and stereotyping. Among all the contents in the book, this essay is the most useful part for me. In the charpter “animal terms for people”, Alleen Pace Nilsen uses many examples to support her point of view. Taking the word “dog” as an example, a lucky dog or a gay dog may be a very int
15、eresting fellow, but when a woman is a dog, she is unattractive, and when shes a bitch, shes the personification of wharever is undersirable in the mind of the speaker. Beside the references I have mentioned above, there are still some other references that help me to construct my thesis. They are e
16、qually important and useful. 3 Later, with the improving of this study, more and more reference will be involved. References: 1Dai,Yuelan.Sexism in EnglishJ.Science & Technology Information,2007(36):767-768. 2Gan,Xiaodan.A Brief Analysis on Sexism in EnglishJ.Science&Technology Information,2010 (23):760-761. 3Tarvers Josephine Koster.Women and MenC.New York: Harper Collins College Publishers, 1992:19-26 4 景亮亮 (Jing,Liangliang). 英汉语言中的 性别歧视之比较 J. 高等教育与学术研究 ,2009(01):56-60.
