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In ancient society, people lived on hunting and fieldwork. The labor-demanding farm work gradually made male members the leading force of the society. Naturally, men gained prominence in the families, thus bestowed with a dominant position in the families and the society at large. Ever since then, human society has entered an era marked with patriarchal dominance. This patriarchal society is based on the belief that the male is the superior sex while female is the inferior sex and many of the social institutions and much social practice are then organized in language to reflect the belief.
Over the past decades, linguists have long been pursing research on the hot issue of sexism in language. As is known in the linguistic circle, sexism is influenced by such factors as gender roles and cultural components. Nowadays since different cultures and languages are often mixed, the communication can undoubtedly be very complicated and difficult。As a result, scholars in this filed have long been intrigued by the issues. Recently, anthropologists and sociolinguists have carried out much research in this field. The results of this kind of research can help us to have a better understanding about the sexist phenomena in different cultures, which will not only benefit the communication but also promote the harmonious language. By making references to some outcomes of the previous studies in this particular subject, this thesis endeavors to explore some feasible and workable ways of eliminating sexism in the use of the English language.源'自:751]'论-文'网"]www.751com.cn
2. Literature Review
The study on language and gender has gone through a long history in western countries. Since the late 1960s and early 1970s when the second wave of the feminist movement started mainly in western English speaking countries, people have been paying attention to the relationship between language and gender. Sociolinguistics also sprang up in the 1960s. Therefore, concern with the representation of women was the characteristics of the works in this period. Lakoff put out the term “women’ language” in 1970 and published Language and Women’s Place in 1975, which is the only work that had direct linguistic impact on the systematic study on language and gender. In the book, he pointed out that in the world of language, men were in the dominated position while the images of women were incomplete, and men’s language constituted the norm but women were prejudiced against in English. His work has drawn the interest of many other linguists in the field of language and gender research. The Semantic Derogation (1975) and The Feminist Critique of Language (1975) by M. Schulz and Aspects of Language (1968) and The Loaded Weapon (1980) by D. Bolinger all belong to the early works of sexism in language. They yield to the same conclusion: language is sexist. Otto Jespersen, the Danish linguist, states that English is the most masculine language as far as he is concerned, in his Growth and Structure of the English Language (1922).
During the second wave of the feminist movement, women in the western world began to fight for their rights. So the researchers in the west got down to the studies on language and gender. Thorne and Henley(1975) held the view that the women’s liberation movement pushed the studies in gender-language field into prominence, and it had great influence on their legitimization and acceptance. From then on, more and more linguists and language researchers began to pay attention to sexism in English. It was widely realized that the English language deprecated and ignored women and made them in lower status in society. The most influential theoretical framework in the field was based on emphasizing men’s dominance. Many studies focused on the discrimination against women reflected in English, and the devastating social consequences of the English language. In many feminists' view, language was and is one of the most powerful instruments of patriarchy. According to Dale Spender (1980), author of Man-Made Language, “the English language is a man-made language and performs as an important contributor to women “oppression”. The linguists went on to make deeper studies on the gender-language issue from the late 1980s to 1990s. Mary Rithchie Key, in her Male/Female language (1996) gives us a detailed description on the gender difference in language, the evolution of gender language, as well as the social and cultural factors on gender language. The 44th International Linguistics Association, held in New York, in 1999, took “language and gender” as the theme topic of the conference. This indicates that “gender-language” has been considered as an important field in linguistics by linguists. The researches in this field involve pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, semantics, dialects, multilingual environment, language acquisition, verbal ability, paralanguage, so on and so forth. The researches of this topic in this period can be thought to be systematic. The studies on sexism in language undertaken by feminist scholars derive from the following primary assumptions. “1) Language concerns the portrayal of men as the norm and women as the appendage. 2) The derogation of women’s agent nouns and the commendation of men’s agent nouns. 3) Words denoting male sex are put in front of female sex such as husband and wife, son and daughter and so on.” (Wang Dechun，Sun Nvjian and Yao Yuan，1992）