Proverbs reflect the human culture and traditional customs。 Human culture includes sexual discrimination, which is aimed at women。 So the proverbs also naturally have a part of the female discrimination。 The thesis aims to find out the causes of the inequality so that we can improve people's awareness of gender discrimination, reduce and even eliminate the gender discrimination in daily life, which expects to be helpful to the further research in the future。
2。 Literature Review文献综述
Sexual discrimination means the prejudice in light of sex, particularly discrimination against the female sex。 It is a widespread phenomenon, which is reflected not only in the daily life, but also in the use of language。
The Danish linguist O。Jespersen was the earliest researcher to study sexism。 In 1923, he presented the viewpoint that English was the most masculine language he had ever seen in his book named Growth and Structure of the English Language。 In 1960, with the rise of West Women’s Liberation and progress in Feminism studies, studies on sexist language made rapid and brilliant advances。 There were some scholars holding the opinion that the new linguistics aimed at achieving equality between men and women was invented。 In 70s and 80s, the linguists represented by Lakoff, Thonle, Henle and Bolinger, kept on the studies to explore the causes of sexism in language。 In 1965, Bolinger’s book was published and provided some points for the study of sexism that he believed that gender differences in language was a phenomenon of language discrimination。 In 1973, Lakoff elaborated on women’ social status to discriminate sexism in language in his book and put forward the opinion that the male was in the center of the world while the female’s image was incomplete (Robin 7)。 Some other scholars made an attempt to describe linguistics with scientific knowledge。 The linguists, Holmes, Coates, Cameron and Key taken as representatives in the period from the end of 80s to 90s, did plenty of work on differences of sexist language。