Item Details

Gender differences in the personal pronouns usage on the corpus of congressional speeches

Issue: Vol 3 No. 2 (2016)

Journal: Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science

Subject Areas: Linguistics

DOI: 10.1558/jrds.30111

Abstract:

Gender differences in language have been extensively investigated by sociolinguists since the 1960s. This paper aimed to study gender differences in the personal pronouns usage on the corpus of the 113th United States Congress. All uninterrupted speeches (672 by women and 3,655 by men) whose transcripts were downloaded from the official repository Thomas were analyzed with the text analysis software Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count calculating the degree to which the politicians use personal pronouns. In addition, the computational analysis results were further analyzed with the software for statistical analysis SPSS. The quantitative analysis results pointed to minor statistically significant gender differences in the personal pronouns usage. However, the qualitative analysis showed more subtle gender differences pointing to linguistic changes in stereotypization.

Author: Dragana Bozic Lenard

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