The Relationship of Gender and Linguistic Behaviour

Introduction Gender is widely considered to be one of the most important elements among the major social determinants of linguistic variation. According to a series of linguistic features studies, gender may even be a dominant factor. The relationship between gender and language behavior is a compelling topic because it is closely related to gender research and is getting more and more attention. Men and women are widely believed to be using different languages ​​in most linguistic communities, although to a different extent (Holmes, 2001).

However, Ochs believes that gender can be indexed either directly or indirectly. Direct indexing is a key relationship between language resources (vocabulary, morpheme, grammar, phonetics, dialect, language etc.) and gender. For example, the pronoun "he" and "her" directly index "male" and "female". However, there may be a secondary relationship between language resources and gender. This may lead to specific actions, activities, or positions, indirectly pointing to gender. In other words, these language resources help to form gender. As an example, there are Japanese particles "ha" and "tsu". The former indirectly pointed out the fine strength indirectly, indicating the "sound" of a woman, the latter indirectly showing "musical" sound after showing the coarse strength directly

Gender is an important concept in linguistics and social psychology, but this term has different meanings in two areas. In linguistics, gender refers to the form (grammar) of nouns and similar nouns. For social psychologists, gender is limited to specific categories or categories. Human gender derived from social structure When it is clear from the background that gender recognition is not clear from the background, to clarify, the first concept is called language or grammatical gender, the second concept is called psychological gender I will. (For psychological sex, please refer to the chapter of Deaux and LaFrance (this volume).)