GENDER DIFFERENCES IN THE CHINESE LANGUAGE:
A PRELIMINARY REPORT
Marjorie K.M. Chan
Ohio State University
Back to title page.
(This is the second of three sections.)
3. LEXICON
In studying the lexicon, it is useful to distinguish gender differences in vocabulary usage on the one hand, and gender-differentiated vocabulary about men and women on the other, even though the distinction may often be blurred. Two traditional disciplinary areas where gender differences in vocabulary are studied are anthropology and historical linguistics. The former often deals with naming, kinship terms, and terms of address and reference, and the latter studies lexical change over time, addressing some of the social, cultural, and political forces that have led to semantic shifts and major changes in vocabulary choice. Much have been written on gender differences in language use and vocabulary about the two sexes from both anthropological and historical linguistic perspectives, although not necessarily with gender differences as the focus.For vocabulary differences between men and women, Chinese does not differ much from other languages in finding it socially more acceptable for men to use profanity and taboo words than it is for women to do so. This is due at least in part to society's expectation for women to be polite and to refrain from strong outburst of their emotions. Furthermore, Shih (1984:219) notes that use of profanity and taboo words would lower a woman's social status. The same would hold true for slang, although perhaps to a lesser extent. One would not be surprised to find in Beijing, for example, more slang expressions invented and used by young men than by young women. Chinese society expects women to be polite when they speak, as noted by Hong (1997:205), and when they do, they should not speak loudly, and their expressions should be refined and elegant. Men, in contrast, are not bound by such social prescriptions. Nonetheless, whether females are politer than males cannot be answered without also taking into consideration such factors as the particular situation and the relative social rank of the interlocutors, as Hong (1997) shows in her study, with requests made under different social and interpersonal contexts.10
China has traditionally drawn a sharp division between males and females and their roles in society. Gender-differentiated speech is but one manifestation; one area in which this can be seen is in the complex network of kinship terms of address. The Chinese system of kinship terms of reference and address takes such variables as sex, generation, and lineage into consideration, so that one differentiates one's mother from one's father, or an older sister from a younger one, and so forth. Usually, the sex of the speaker does not enter into terms of address in modern Chinese (but see Feng 1937 for some cases in Chinese history). However, Chao (1956/76:339) has noted the possibility of women using mm, the weak form of women 我們 'we, us', more frequently than men. Of greater interest to Chao is the practice of teknonymy, in which a person addresses another as if s/he were a generation lower, as in a woman addressing her parents-in-law as gonggong 公公 and popo 婆婆. However, he notes the declining practice of teknonymy by married women and its replacement by the adoption of the husband's terms of address for other relations as well as for his parents.11
Chao (1956/72:314) also mentions a special use of the third person singular, ta 他, that had in earlier times been used by women to refer to their husband (and less frequently the other way around): a woman would hem and haw, and by the way ta 'he' was mentioned with studied casualness, quite out of context or connection, a hearer would understand at once that it was her husband she was referring to. How a woman refers to her husband -- or calls him -- has changed over the years in response to different social, geographical, political, and ideological settings. The same holds true for a man's terms of address for his wife, as well as others.
The first-person use of renjia 人家 that is almost exclusively used by females and within certain restricted interactional contexts also merits attention. In the context of Taiwan, at least, renjia is discussed by Farris (1995:15, 156 fn.5) in connection with sajiao communication style. It is noted by Shih (1984:219) as a form that females use to refer to themselves, as they seldom use the pronoun, wo 我 'I, me.' F.Y. Chao (1995), who identifies renjia as the most prominent gender-related pronoun in modern Chinese, offers a different analysis from Farris, who treats renjia as being used by young girls who are too shy to use the unmarked first person pronoun. Chao proposes, instead, that renjia is not only used by young girls but also by female adults, in that the word renjia carries with it the social marker of femininity, and is thus not determined or limited by age or social status. She argues that women then choose renjia as the first-person pronoun when they want to increase their femininity to be more attractive, or to convince or suggest others to yield. Hence, if a man uses renjia to refer to himself, he would be called niangniangqiang 'womanish'; and if a boy uses it to refer to himself, he would be corrected. The only occasion in which a man would use renjia to refer to himself is if he were deliberating imitating women's speech.
In her study, Chao (1995) presents an insightful analysis of females' selection of renjia (as opposed to the regular pronoun, wo), as due to society's expectation that women be indirect. In the process of making such a choice, it also expresses to some degree an uncertainty on the part of the speaker as to what she is talking about, in contrast to stereotypical male speech, which is direct, succinct, and to the point.
Chao further identifies three social functions of renjia as a gender-marked pronoun. One is intimacy, for indicating the close relationship between speakers, as in conversations between mother and daughter, between best friends, or between spouses. The second is subordination, which typically, though not always, involves the speaker as the relatively powerless participant in the conversation. The third social function is self-identity, since renjia is used only by females and the referent is also female only.
Here, we will also cover the topic of sentence-final particles (SFPs). These have also been referred to as 'modal particles,' which signal a speaker's attitude and/or sentiment s/he wishes to convey toward the addressee. They do not have some primary grammatical function, such as marking a sentence as a yes-no question using ma 嗎. One sentence-final particle already mentioned above involves ma 嘛 in sajiao style. In analyzing SFPs as an East Asian areal feature, Erbaugh (1985:88) remarks that there exists a general assumption that women use them more than men.12 This common view has linked the greater use of sentence-final particles by women to their need to be more polite. Light (1982:29) addresses, in particular, confirmation-seeking particles in connection with the use of high pitch, and notes that such particles are the mark of intentional politeness and nonassertiveness, and higher tonations indicate greater politeness and nonassertiveness. The difference between (4a) and (4b) below, from Light (p.29), is a contrast between the use of o in (4a) to conclude polite formulaic phrases, and 9 with rising pitch in (4b), which Light regards as almost de rigeur for a woman to use in polite society.13
| (4) | a. | Wáng Xiāngsheng, bié kèqi, o! Wang Mr. neg-imp. polite part. 'Don't be polite, Mr. Wang.' |
| b. | Wáng Xiāngsheng, bié kèqi, ó! |
In Beijing speech, Hu (1981:419; 1991c:71) identifies ba 吧 as one particle that female speakers often use in recent years. It marks pauses, as exemplified in the following sentence, which Hu heard one day on the bus: Wo ba, zuor ba, gei ta dale ge dianhua. Ta ba, shei zhidao, bu zai jia! 我吧,昨兒吧,給她打了個電話. 她吧,誰知道,不在家! 'I ba, yesterday ba, telephoned her. She ba, who knows, is not at home!' Hu suggests that as a result of adding ba, the speaker seems less definite, and thus sounds more tactful, so that it became popular among females.
Besides its use as a hedge in discourse, ba has also been described as a SFP that is used to soften the tone of speech, making it less blunt, or less definite, in interrogatives and imperatives.14 The use of SFPs to soften an otherwise bare statement, question, or request can readily be seen as a politeness strategy that women might employ more than men, in response to prescribed social norms for women in Chinese culture.
Shih (1984:221) mentions that women uses a great deal of SFPs and interjections. She (p.219, 221) identifies such sentence-final particles as ma 嘛, ya 呀, ne 呢, la 啦, and ye 耶 as ones that are more frequently used by women. With respect to interjections, these include aiyo 哎喲 and aiya 哎呀.
Shih (1984:219) also discusses other gender-marked expressions, such as sigui 死鬼 (literally 'dead ghost'), taoyan 討厭 '(how) annoying', and wode ma ya 我的媽呀 'Heavens!' (literally, 'my mother').15 She emphasizes that such expressions as these (including interjections and sentence-final particles mentioned above), are not gender-exclusive. However, she cautions that a man who uses such gender-marked expressions too frequently would be laughed at as being niangniangqiang. Public ridicule of this kind is surely the most effective deterrent, providing social pressure to ensure the maintenance of a sharp distinction between the sexes in the use gender-differentiated speech forms.
A number of authors (e.g., Shih 1984, Farris 1988, Tan 1990) have commented on deprecatory terms used to describe or refer to women in traditional China's patriarchal society through the centuries. Thus, it is noteworthy that in post-1949 mainland China, in the spirit of egalitarianism, the Chinese government abolished such discriminatory expressions as nüzi wucai bianshi de 女子無才便是德 'a woman is virtuous when she is incapable' (Tai 1975:237).
Although terms and expressions that reflect strong sexist bias are slowly disappearing in modern Chinese settings, more deeply entrenched in the language are compounds that still reflect the historical placement of males' worth above that of females. This can be gleaned from the male-female sequence of constituents in such compounds as fumu 父母 'father and mother, parents.' Prosodically, with respect to the historical four-tone categories of Ping, Shang, Qu, and Ru (平上去入), Qu precedes Shang in fumu, and not the preferred prosodic sequence of Shang before Qu that one regularly finds in established coordinate compounds (cf. Ting 1969, Lien 1989). In other words, the semantic constraint of 'male-before-female' takes precedence over a competing, prosodic one in the compound, fumu. These cases argue strongest for a sexist bias in the sequence of the components. Still, age or generation might also be an underlying semantic factor in the sequence. This is more clearly shown in xiongdi 兄弟 'older and younger brother, brothers' and in munü 母女 'mother and daughter,' where the constituents within the compounds differ in age and/or generation but not in gender.
In other compounds involving gender, where the constituents share the same tone category, as in fuqi 夫妻 'husband and wife' and zinü 子女 'sons and daughters, (one's) children,' semantics - which places males before females - plays a key role in determining the order, without need to compete with prosodic constraints. It is significant that one does not find many cases of a reversed order, yinyang being the celebrated 'exception,' at least when one considers semantics only.16 In cases where prosody and semantics converge, as in nannü 男女 'male and female,' ernü 兒女 'sons and daughters, (one's) children,' and fufu 夫婦 'husband and wife,' where Ping (or 'Even') precedes non-Ping (or 'Oblique' Ze 仄) tone, semantics is not the sole basis for determining the sequence. Examples such as these are weakest as evidence for male dominance being reflected in the language.
This section closes with a few comments on gender-marked language with respect to terms of address and personal names. This topic has been well studied (cf. Tai 1976; Sung 1981; Hong-Fincher 1987, 1992; Farris 1988; Lin 1988, etc.). Examples that have been discussed include multiple terms of social identity and address for females (xiaojie 小姐 'Miss,' taitai 太太 'Mrs.,' furen 夫人 'Madam,' nüshi 女士 'Ms.') that reflect social and marital status, as well age (e.g., one could consider a young school girl a xiaojie but not nüshi) versus one term only for males (xiansheng 先生 'Mr.'). The implications of such asymmetry is noted within a theory of marking by Shih (1984), and pursued in greater detail by Farris (1988), in her study of gender differences reflected in the script17 and lexicon. Included are cases of overt gender-marking with nü 'female' preceding terms for occupations that have traditionally been male-dominated and thus are covertly marked <+masculine> (e.g. I>nüyisheng 女醫生 '(woman) doctor').
On gender-marking, Lin's (1988) book on choosing a name for one's newborn baby may be of linguistic interest for studying which Chinese characters she identifies as names for boys, and which as names for girls. In her corpus of over 900 Chinese characters, she marks those characters that are appropriate for males with 'M' and those for females with 'F.' Characters that she views as gender-neutral and may be used for either sex are left unmarked. Examples of characters that are marked exclusively for use in males' names include: hao 浩 'great, vast,' long 龍 'dragon,' and yao 耀 'shine.' Examples of characters for female-exclusive name are: bi 碧 'green jade,' he 荷 'lotus,' and ting 婷 'graceful.' And lastly, gender-neutral characters for names include: hua 華 'splendid,' jing 精 'refined, wen 文 'refined,' and zhi 志 'ideal.' With mainland China taking a more egalitarian approach during the latter half of this century, the traditionally-marked feminine names are less frequently used, so that a person's sex often cannot be decided from simply studying the name. This contrasts with Chinese communities that still embrace a more traditional outlook, where the ideals of femininity and masculinity are intimately linked to name selection.
4. SYNTAX AND PRAGMATICS
Among the literature on language and gender, very little has been written on gender-related variations in syntactic structures. McConnell-Ginet (1988:84) identifies the reason syntactic variation has been studied less than phonological variation as being due in part to the difficulty in defining the unit that 'varies.' This is because different syntactic constructions often differ also in function, unlike phonetic variants of a single phonological unit (such as the different phonetic realizations of /w/ in Beijing Mandarin).In section 3, we discussed differences between men and women usage (or non-usage) of renjia and various SFPs. Other gender-related differences can be observed in the language. In Ye's (1995) study of complimenting in Chinese,18 for example, some gender-differentiated patterns emerge with respect to both types of compliments based on topic and sex of the participants (including taking into account same-sex versus mixed-sex situations), and types of responses to those compliments. Concerning grammatical structures specifically, we focus on the cases presented in Ye (p.246) where the compliments involve an activity (e.g. painting), and where the responses are explicit and contain a positive semantic carrier. The result shows that males used nouns more often than females. An example is shou 手 '(good) hand', as in: Mei xiangdao, ni hai you zhe shou. 沒想到,你還有這手. 'I didn't expect you to have such a talent.' Females, on the other hand, preferred adverbs, as in the use of bucuo 不錯 'quite well,' in: Huade zhen bucuo. 畫得真不錯. 'You paint really (quite) well.'
Gender distribution is given by Ye (p.246) in percentage figures only: males' preference of nouns is 24.1% to females' 10.8%, and females' preference of adverbs is 32.0% to males' 19.8%. Without raw figures or statistics, the observed distribution can only be treated as a possible tendency, to be explored in the future with naturally-occurring data. Nonetheless, Ye's (p.264) analysis of the use of nouns is interesting. S/he suggests that this reflects a process of categorization wherein the complimenter places the complimentee into an evaluative category (e.g. shifu 師傅 'master,' huajia 畫家 'artist'). For Ye, this also demonstrates that the speakers are deeply influenced by the Confucian tradition of ming bu zheng, yan bu shun 名不正,言不順 'nothing is perfectly justifiable without being placed into the right categories' (literal translation given in a footnote: 'If the name is not correct, the speech cannot be right.'). If indeed it is not as appropriate for females to be so definite in categorizing people based on their activity or performance, one would predict that the evaluative response of using nouns would tend to be avoided by females, and the preference would be for a more formulaic, adverbial response such as hen hao 很好, or bucuo 不錯 'quite well.'
In his pragmatic study of interrogatives in Chinese using modern Taiwan drama as his database, McGinnis (1990) includes sex as one of his independent variables to determine if there are any gender differences in production of types of interrogatives. The results are negative with one exception, namely, males use the A-not-A questions containing the copula significantly more than females do (p.118). However, as McGinnis does not offer an explanation, more research is needed to determine if the pattern is reflected in natural discourse, and if so, what socio-cultural factors are operating.
Christensen (1994) does not study gender issues per se, but his data show possible gender-related differences. He uses Wallace Chafe's so-called pear film to obtain a corpus of oral and written narratives from ten subjects. Six of the subjects were female (BCEGHJ) and four were male (ADFI).19 While the subject pool is small for a cross-gender study, some preliminary observations can be made. Note first that all subjects watched the same film, which is seven minutes in duration, contains sound but no dialogue, and depicts a series of simple events that can be easily understood in any cultural context. Thus, all subjects were exposed to the same stimulus, to which they gave their own renditions based on recall. Of interest here is how the subjects retold the film, and whether any gender differences can be gleaned from the data. I have chosen to study reduplication, based on the hypothesis that females will use more reduplication than males. The premise is that such forms sound more polite and more tentative, and also sound more expressive in narrating the events in the film. Noteworthy here is Zhan's (1992:24ff) proposal that reduplication is a positive politeness strategy for intensifying interest to the hearer, as in telling a story, making the description more vivid.
In this study, false starts are excluded. They can easily be discerned from listening to the audiotaped recordings. Counted are reduplication of verbs, adjectives/stative verbs, adverbs, nouns, and classifiers/measures. Expressly for this exercise, treated with reduplicated verbs are cases of repetitions of verbs used for narrative continuation; that is, for moving the action along. An example is the opening line of Subject B's narrative (p.184), which contains the verb, cai 采 'to pick.' Cai was first used as the main verb, and then repeated three times to emphasize the repetition and continuation of that action in the scene: OK. Yi ge nanren zai cai lizi / cai, cai, cai / OK. 一個男人在采梨子 / 采, 采, 采 / 'OK. A man was picking pears. He picked and picked and picked.' The results from the oral narratives show that all the females produced some reduplicated forms, while one of the four males did not produce any. A total of 21 reduplicated forms were produced, of which 18 (86%) were uttered by the six female subjects, and only 3 (14%) by the four male subjects. The females produced more than their share: they averaged 3 reduplicated forms per female, in contrast to .75 per male. Even in the written narratives, where one would expect the more formal style to yield few or no reduplicated forms, females once again out-produced males, this time with a ratio of 7 to 1. The 7 reduplicated forms are in 4 of the six females' written narratives. While the pool of male and female subjects is very small, the results are revealing in confirming, tentatively at least, the hypothesis that females use more reduplicated forms in narratives than males. If similar results obtain in a quantitative study using a larger corpus, this pilot study then provides preliminary evidence of gender-stereotyped speech reflected in language use, and moreover, of gender differences at the syntactic level.
NOTES (numbers 10 through 19)
10. See also Pan (1995), in which official rank outweighs age and gender in the use of politeness strategies in verbal interaction. Cantonese data for the study are collected in Foshan, Guangdong. [BACK]
11. The practice of teknonymy is also cited in Shih (1984:219), together with other observations. [BACK]
12. For Cantonese, Chan's (forthcoming) study of the naturally-produced corpus of je and jek sentence-final particles reveals that females use je and jek (and especially jek) more frequently than males do. A full-scale study will likely show that females use SFPs more often than males. [BACK]
13. Light (1982:29) also gives Cantonese counterparts with ho corresponding to o in Mandarin (4a) and rising tone on hó corresponding to ó in Mandarin in (4b). [BACK]
14. Ba is discussed in Hu (1981, 1991c), Li and Thompson (1981), Zhan (1992), and others, though it is not normally identified as a gender-preferential particle. Using ba as a softener to convey less certainty would make the utterance stereotypically more feminine in speech style. [BACK]
15. Concerning the word, sigui, Debbie Yuching Knicely informs the author that women in Taiwan generally use it only as a scolding term for referring to their husbands, such as in complaining to friends about their husband having gotten drunk again the night before. She further notes that it tends to be used more by women in the older generation, especially those from mainland China. She treats Wode ma ya! as an expression used by both sexes, and considers Wode tian a! 我的天啊! 'Oh heavens!' (literally, 'my sky/heaven') the one that females often use and not men. [BACK]
16. In coordinate compounds with both constituents in Ping tone, the syllable with a voiceless (qing 清) initial typically precedes that with a voiced (zhuo 濁) initial (Ting 1969). The sequence of the constituents in yinyang 陰陽 'yin and yang', a historically well-established compound, obeys this phonological constraint of 'qing-before-zhuo,' and not the semantic one of 'male-before-female.' In adding 'qing-before-zhuo' as a further phonological constraint on ordering of constituents within well-established coordinate compounds, a reconsideration of zinü 'sons and daughters' is needed. While both syllables are in Shang tone, the two constituents differ in that zi has a qing initial and nü a zhuo one, so that phonologically, the sequence is 'qing-before-zhuo.' If we take historical phonology into consideration, it would be more appropriate to treat zinü as a convergence of semantic and phonological constraints. In doing so, its value as an example of sexism reflected in the language is greatly diminished. [BACK]
17. The so-called 'radicals' in the Chinese writing system and the characters containing them have been of interest in studying the selection of personal names, and the study of words describing the two sexes. Cf. Sung 1981, Shih 1984, Farris 1988, and Tan 1990. [BACK]
18. Ye's (1995) investigation is based on a discourse completion task with written responses from .native Chinese speakers in the PRC. [BACK]
19. My thanks to Matt Christensen for permitting me to use his audiotaped recordings of the oral narratives for my small study here. Transcripts of the oral and written narratives are given in Christensen's (1994) Appendices A and B. Subjects are identified by letters only. Sex identification is made possible here from listening to the recorded oral narratives. [BACK]
[ TITLE PAGE | MID SECTION | FINAL SECTION ]
To Publications Page
Copyright (c) 1997 Marjorie K.M. Chan. All rights reserved.
Created 1 December 1997. Last Update: 4 April 2004.
URL: http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/chan9/articles/naccl9-b.htm