Abstract

The relationship of language and gender in social linguistics is a very hot issue. Most linguists explore the relationship between language and gender from the perspective of gender differences, and they have a lot of controversy especially in gender discrimination in language. Countless articles are written to explore the discrimination against females in language, but in recent years, some scholars think that is unfair to males and point out that the discrimination against males in language does also exist. From the statistical analysis on the basis of the words used to describe two genders on COCA corpus, we find that the changes occurred in society bring the narrowing of the gender differences and a lot of coincidence in the words used to modify males and females, showing the phenomenon of convergence.

Key words: gender, language, society, words, COCA

摘要

语言和性别的关系问题是社会语言学界一个十分流行的讨论议题。大多数语言学家都是从性别差异的角度来探讨语言和性别的关系，尤其是对语言中存在的性别歧视争议颇多。探讨语言中存在的对女性的歧视的文章数不胜数，近年来，也有些学者为男性抱不平，指出语言中也存在对男性的歧视。在对COCA语料库中修饰两性用词的统计分析的基础上，我们发现，社会的变化带来两性差异的缩小，修饰两性的用词出现了大量的重合，呈现出趋同的迹象。

关键词： 性别；语言；社会；词汇；语料库

1. Introduction
Language is the mirror of the society. Language reflects the reality and culture, and the factors of society and culture in turn to influence the development of language (Ren Haitang, 2007).Generally, people hold the idea that, due to the different physical and social roles between male and female, the language reflected is also different. However, with the revolution and development of society, more and more women are involved in the working place. The social roles of different genders tend to overlap. The demarcation of male and female is becoming misty. This is also reflected in language.