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

Authors

  • Dragana Bozic Lenard University of Osijek, Osijek, Croatia.

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jrds.30111

Keywords:

congressional speeches, gender differences, LIWC, personal pronouns, SPSS

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.

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Published

2017-10-30

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Section

Articles

How to Cite

Bozic Lenard, D. (2017). Gender differences in the personal pronouns usage on the corpus of congressional speeches. Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science, 3(2), 161-188. https://doi.org/10.1558/jrds.30111

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