A diachronic evaluation of gender asymmetry in euphemism
A diachronic evaluation of gender asymmetry in euphemism
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委婉语中性别不对称的历时评价
DOI：
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发表时间：
2021
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
Yang Xu
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
A. Kapron;Yang Xu
委婉语的使用是语言变化的一个众所周知的驱动因素。有人提出，女性比男性更多地使用委婉语。虽然已经有几项研究对语言中的性别差异进行了调查，但委婉语的用法还没有得到全面的检验。如果女性确实更多地使用委婉语，这可能意味着随着时间的推移，女性也会领导新委婉语的形成和语言的变化。我们使用了四个大型英语历时语料库，通过定量分析对女性比男性使用委婉语的说法进行了评估。我们收集了106对委婉语-禁忌语的列表，分析了它们在语料库中不同性别随时间的相对使用情况。与现有的看法相反，我们的结果表明，女性使用委婉语的比例并不高于男性。我们使用委婉语-禁忌语对列表的不同子集重复分析，发现我们的结果是稳健的。我们的研究表明，在包括口头和书面在内的各种场合，在不同程度的正式场合，女性并不比男性更多地使用或形成委婉语。
The use of euphemisms is a known driver of language change. It has been proposed that women use euphemisms more than men. Although there have been several studies investigating gender differences in language, the claim about euphemism usage has not been tested comprehensively through time. If women do use euphemisms more, this could mean that women also lead the formation of new euphemisms and language change over time. Using four large diachronic text corpora of English, we evaluate the claim that women use euphemisms more than men through a quantitative analysis. We assembled a list of 106 euphemism-taboo pairs to analyze their relative use through time by each gender in the corpora. Contrary to the existing belief, our results show that women do not use euphemisms with a higher proportion than men. We repeated the analysis using different subsets of the euphemism-taboo pairs list and found that our result was robust. Our study indicates that in a broad range of settings involving both speech and writing, and with varying degrees of formality, women do not use or form euphemisms more than men.