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Each language represents one profound culture. Culture consists of all the shared products of human society. (He Shanfen, 2005: 33) This means not only such material things as cities, organizations and schools, but also non-material things such as ideas, customs, family patterns, languages. (Den Yanchang and Liu Runqing, 1994: 3) Sexism in language is the reflection of various antiquated ideas, feudal conventions and bad customs in different cultures. Its reinforcement in social inequality and sexual prejudice against women hinder the development of society.
This thesis attempts to present a systematic comparison of sexism between English and Chinese from a cultural perspective and to give some advice on how to reduce the sexism in language. More importantly than all of that, the aim is to deepen people’s understanding of the sexism in language so as to make social progress.
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The sexism in language has remained a hot topic among linguists for a long time. Till now, many scholars and linguists have focused on this topic in an attempt to eliminate the sexism in language. American scholar, Allen Pace Nilsen (1990: 22) holds that the users of English value women for their sexiness and men for their success in his book Sexisn and Language. Danish linguist, Otto Jesperson (1922: 33) has pointed out that English is the most masculine language in his book Growth and Structure of the English Language. And he is the earliest linguist who focuses on ‘gender language’. David A. Lillie (2009: 54) provides some solutions to eliminate sexism in English. David Moser (2007) finds out that the sexism exists in Chinese characters, idioms and proverbs and so on. Chinese linguist Yang Yonglin (2004) has also done a great contribution to the research of sexism in English. Besides, some famous Chinese scholars like Shao Zhihong (2013) and He Shanfen (2005) also have done contrastive studies between English and Chinese in terms of rhetoric and semantics.
As a whole, all these studies help to pave a way for the author to make an analysis on the sexism in English and Chinese from a cultural perspective and give some advice on how to reduce the sexism in English and Chinese.