GENDER DIFFERENCES IN THE CHINESE LANGUAGE:
A PRELIMINARY REPORT
Marjorie K.M. Chan
Ohio State University
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(This is the third and final section.)
5. CONCLUSION
The research presented thus far in this paper on gender differences in Mandarin Chinese falls within the boundaries of traditional areas in linguistics, with heed also paid to pragmatic and discourse approaches. The types of data for these studies include vocabulary lists; observational data; introspection by native speakers; interviews; quantitative studies; oral and written narratives; drama scripts with varying degrees of improvisation; surveys and questionnaires in the form of discourse completion tasks; and conversational data that range from slightly scripted to completely unscripted. For an understanding of language use, in-depth studies based on audio- and/or videotaped recordings of natural, spontaneous speech are crucial. These have been extremely limited thus far. Farris' (1991) ethnographic study of child discourse is one, as is Kuo's (1997) study of women talk. Natural, impromptu speech from radio talk, and phone-in, shows is yet another source, and one tapped by Shen (1997).Based on a corpus of radio talk/phone-in shows recorded off the World Wide Web, Shen's thesis is part of the new direction of linguistic research on conversational interaction. Such research recognizes the importance of socio-cultural contexts in the construction of gender. Shen conducts a systematic, quantitative study of gender differences and analyzes such discourse variables as amount of speech, turn-taking and floors, interruptions (dominant vs. supportive), and functions of utterances (assertive vs. supportive). Statistically significant differences are found in the distribution of amount of talk by gender based on topic. Men talked a greater amount of time than women overall, though not on all shows: they spoke significantly more on politics and economy. For women it was family and education. However, women participated to a very limited degree on love and marriage. Shen suggests the possibility that Chinese women may not be expected to, or be allowed to, talk about highly sensitive topics with people who are not closely related to them. Or perhaps women are simply not used to talking about sexuality in a public mixed-sex setting. These patterns are some of the results in Shen's quantitative study on conversational interaction. This study is probably the first of its kind for Chinese.
Language plays a key role in the construction and socialization of gender roles. This is an area where Chinese can contribute, both cross-linguistically to the growing body of literature on the subject, and across disciplines to broader issues on gender.
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