خلاصة:
The language used by women and men differ in all speech communities. In order to examine some of these variations, the present study aimed to investigate the differences in an informal written discourse. For this purpose, a comparison between men’s and women’s informal language was made regarding length of utterances, questions, intensifiers, and hedges. Results revealed that men employed higher length of utterance and slightly more hedges than women. On the other hand, women tended to ask more questions and used more intensifiers than men. The findings may pave the way to better understand the world of communication
ملخص الجهاز:
An Investigation of Gender Differences Between Women's and Men's Informal Discussion in Iranian EFL Context Mehran Memari', Mehdi Zia2, Amir Zalpour' 1Phd, Assistant professor, Farhangian University, Ahvaz, Iran 2Phd Student, Department of Teaching English Foreign Language, Shiraz University, Shiraz, Iran; amirzalpour@gmail.
, Department of Medical Library and Information Science, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran Abstract The language used by women and men differ in all speech communities.
For this purpose, a comparison between men's and women's informal language was made regarding length of utterances, questions, intensifiers, and hedges.
g. Dousti & Eslami Rasekh, 2016; Hermosilla, 2012; Mei-Rong & Hsieh, 2007; Michael, Liaw, Muthusamy & Veeravagu, 2010; Ogunsiji, Farinde & Adebiyi, 2012; Shakouri & Saligheh, 2012).
Most of these studies highlighted some crucial results about the differences in linguistic features of men's and women's speech in terms of politeness, hedges, voice speed, contents, functions, questions, etc.
In order to fill this gap, the present study intends to identify the differences in linguistic features of men's and women's informal discussion regarding the following features: length of utterance, questions, intensifiers, and hedges.
Data Analysis To analyze the data in this study, the researchers made use of frequency counts to show the length of utterances, questions, intensifiers, and hedges produced by the males and females.
Furthermore, the following table is adapted from Michael, Liaw, Muthusamy, and Veeravagu (2010) as a guide to determine the frequency of questions, hedges, and intensifiers realized in the utterances of male and female participants.