Publications

Publication details [#7472]

Luchjenbroers, June. 1998. Animals, embryos, thinkers and doers: Metaphor and gender representation in Hong Kong English. 18 pp.

Abstract

Research into the linguistic descriptions of women has revealed that females tend to be defined in terms of their relationships to men and their appearance and/or sexual attributes, and that women and their activities tend to be trivialized. Additionally, research has uncovered dehumanizing descriptions of women as food and as animals, such as birds and horses. Such metaphors reflect individually or socially constructed conceptual associations between real-world phenomena that may serve to trivialize or enhance members of a given group. This paper reports on an investigation into lexical representations of men and women in the Hong Kong variety of English. Analysis includes all nominal and verbal descriptors of men and women and the acts performed by them. These descriptors were distributed into semantic classes on the basis of the qualities they reveal about their human referents. Results show that men are conceptualized as pro-active and assertive beings, to some extent born to succeed, whereas women are underdeveloped, emotional, and in need of protection. The gender metaphors of women are compatible with concepts of both early stages of human development and subhuman entities, such as animals. (LLBA 2000, vol. 34, n. 1)