Abstract:

Research on gender and language has always been one of the subjects of Sociolinguistics. The paper, which is based on the theory of deficit, dominance, difference, politeness and constructionism, takes ten speeches of the same topics made by Obama and Hillary for example and makes comparison between them. Vocabulary in the speeches are classified and analyzed to illustrate the gender differences in the usage of vocabulary through the data. It is found that the gender difference of the usage of modals and first personal plural pronouns of Obama and Hillary is distinct, while the difference of the usage of adjectives is not obvious, which is different from the theory of the predecessors.

Key words: gender difference, lexical usage, public speech

摘要：

性别与语言研究一直是社会语言学所关注的课题之一。本文以奥巴马和希拉里的十篇政治演讲稿为例，以缺陷论、支配论、差异论、礼貌论和建构论等主流理论为理论支持，对比分析了奥巴马和希拉里针对同一领域做出的公众演讲。文章将词汇进行不同类型的分类和分析，用数据来表明在词汇使用方面所表现出来性别差异。结果表明奥巴马和希拉里在情态动词和第一人称代词的使用上显示出了明显的性别差异，但在形容词的使用上则异于前人的研究结果，并没有明显差异。

关键词：性别差异； 词汇使用； 公众演讲

1. Introduction
During the past one hundred years, linguists made a lot of significant studies on language differences between different genders. With the development of sociolinguistics, pragmatics and so on, linguists Lakoff (1975), Cameron (2005), Trudgill (1974), etc. began to concentrate on the gender difference from various perspectives of linguistics. They did some research on styles of speeches and strategies of communication between men and women, and made a thorough inquiry about the principles that should be followed in the successful communication.
The importance of gender difference in language using has been specially stressed and widely acknowledged by many well-known scholars both at home and abroad. This paper will make a further research into the topic by comparing public speeches made between different genders. The year 2008 witnessed the campaign speeches of the president of the United States Barack H. Obama and the Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. By comparing their lexical usage in their speeches, the paper tries to answer the question: how different can lexical usages be in public speeches made by different genders?