Autoand heterostereotypes of Chinese women and men: Appearance
The current paper reports the results of sociolinguistic experiment that aimed to determine the language patterns of expressing gender auto- and heterostereotypes about female and male appearance. The data were obtained from questionnaires performed by 60 subjects (30 males and 30 females). Semantic and statistic analyses were used to process the subjects' reactions. The obtained reactions were grouped in accordance with common semantic features, and it resulted in developing the field models of stereotypes structure with the core, middle zone and periphery. The study showed a considerable similarity of the total number of semantic features in the core zones for men and women. The middle zone (with the common features of “slim”, “height” and “behavior”) and the periphery (with no common features found) demonstrated rather differences than similarity that indicated incomplete stereotypization of the features. As expected, autostereotypes contained less negative features than heterostereotypes.