| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 華語文教學系 === 101 === Language is an important medium through which culture is expressed. Gender is an important element of social construction. The way gender is seen and constructed in a society reflects that society’s cultural outlook. Traditional Chinese culture favors males over females and has set expectations toward gender roles. These attitudes are reflected in some gender-related words, such as “nán zhǔ wài, nǚ zhǔ nèi”（男主外，女主內）, “jià jī suí jī, jià gǒu suí gǒu”（嫁雞隨雞，嫁狗隨狗）and “fū chàng fù suí”（夫唱婦隨）. This study aims to determine whether the meanings and contexts of gender-words in modern society still reflect traditional concepts and cultural phenomena, or whether they have changed over time.
The gender-words used in this research were collected from newspapers, books, dictionaries and papers. These words were first divided into three categories: “gender figure”, “marriage expectation” and “family responsibility”. The meanings of these gender-words were then analyzed, and three databases were searched to determine the frequency the words appeared in each, and the different contexts in which they were used. These three databases were Scripta Sinica database, Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus of Modern Chinese and Udndata.
The results show that some gender-words have in fact changed. For example, the word order of some has been switched, such as “fù chàng fū suí”（婦唱夫隨）and “nǚ zhŭ wài, nán zhŭ nèi”（女主外，男主內）.These new gender-words show that gender roles can be transformed. Gender-words like “nán zūn nǚ bèi”（男尊女卑）and “nán nǚ yǒu bié”（男女有別）have also been used in different ways. However, some traditional notions of gender roles persist. For example, modern culture continues to emphasize gender roles in marriage and family, as shown by the frequent use of the words “jiā ting zhŭ fù ”（家庭主婦）, “xián qī liáng mŭ”（賢妻良母）and the new word “shèng nǚ”（剩女）. Meanwhile, the context of “niáng niáng qiāng”（娘娘腔）and “nán rén pó”（男人婆）reflects gender stereotypes in modern society.
Finally, after inspecting the chapters related to gender in Chinese textbooks, this study suggests that teachers teach gender-words from different perspectives, such as teaching semantic meaning, word building and cultural concepts to help students understand cultural phenomena in modern society and contrast the different aspects between traditional and modern culture.
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