Abstract

The study of gender and language encompasses several areas of academic research. In early days, mass writings, which describe bisexual questions became popular after the gender and language research was published. Among these writings, Deborah Tannen’s assertion from the viewpoint of interculture research that explains the differences in between genders has been widely accepted bythe public. It is usually quoted in academic research as well. In addition, her research could be seen as the authority in the area of gender and language.

This article tries to employ Tannen’s viewpoints,as described in her 1990 work “You Just Don’t Understand：Women and Men in Conversation”. To analyze gender differences in communication language . Furthermore, it talks about the on-line communication style and language use between two genders.

The net possesses the distinguishing characteristics of anonymity, interaction, and accessibility. Therefore, in the gender research of CMC (Computer-Mediated Communication), some scholars think optimistically that both genders equally participate and communicate on line. This article is going to inspect some latter results of CMC gender research.

Although the net possesses the distinguishing characteristics of anonymity, interaction, and accessibility, researchers found similar gender communication styles online and real world. The characteristics of online gender communication style is related to the characteristics of face- to-face gender communication style. The goal of this article is to explore the value of Tannen’s research in order to understand if the difference of the two genders’ communication language in the real world has been affected by online communication mode.

Keywords：Gender、Communication Style、CMC