Abstract

Language is not only a tool for communication, but also a mirror of the real world. It can reflect various cultural thoughts and social phenomenon. As a kind of  long-standing social phenomenon, sexism must be reflected on the language and its usage. In recent years, the relationship between language and gender has become a hot topic of sociolinguistics. The most obvious performance of English sexism is asymmetric usage of vocabulary. Markedness is quite a common phenomenon in English, referring to a certain asymmetry within a category. This article analyzes sexism in English language in terms of formal marking, distributional marking and semantic marking from the perspective of markedness theory. The markers of gender nouns are relatively simple, the main form is that masculine nouns are unmarked, while feminine nouns are marked. In order to get rid of sexism, it is necessary to completely eliminate people’s traditional biased concept about man and woman so that the real equality between the sexes can be achieved.

Key Words: sexism   markedness theory   gender

摘  要

语言不仅是人们交流的工具，也是现实世界的一面镜子，它能反映出人类社会的各种文化观念和社会现象。性别歧视作为一种由来已久的社会现象，必然反映在语言和语言的使用中。近几年来,语言和性别的关系已经逐渐成为社会语言学研究的一个热点。英语中性别歧视的最明显表现是在词汇的不对称使用上，而标记是英语中常见的现象，它指的是在一个范畴内部存在的某种不对称现象。本文运用标记理论，从分布标记、形式标记和语义标记的角度来探讨分析英语语言中的性别歧视现象。在探讨中，我们发现英语中性别名词的标记现象比较简单，主要表现为阳性可以无标记，而阴性有标记。而要想彻底根除语言中的性别歧视现象，就必须要消除人们思想中的男尊女卑的观念，实现男女真正意义上的平等。

关键词：性别歧视  标记理论  性别

1 Introduction
Language is a vehicle for communicating thought and transferring information, which plays an important role in historical development of human beings. It reflects people’s cognition of objective things as well as thinking pattern. Since language is created, it has been changing with historical development. Therefore, it can give real expression to social situations at that time. Originally, language sexism does not sexist, however, in the long process of history, because men and women’s social division of labour and environment in which they are raised are different, language forms its gender differential. And this differential is most obvious in application of languages, which is called sexism in languages.