Gender, Genre, and Writing Style in Formal Written Texts

This paper explores differences between male and female writing in a large subset of the British National Corpus covering a range of genres. Several classes of simple lexical and syntactic features that differ substantially according to author gender are identified, both in fiction and in non-fiction documents. In particular, we find significant differences between maleand female-authored documents in the use of pronouns and certain types of noun modifiers: although the total number of nominals used by male and female authors is virtually identical, females use many more pronouns and males use many more noun specifiers. More generally , it is found that even in formal writing, female writing exhibits greater usage of features identified by previous researchers as "involved" while male writing exhibits greater usage of features which have been identified as "informational". Finally, a strong correlation between the characteristics of male (female) writing and those of nonfiction (fiction) is demonstrated. Introduction The question of identifying and interpreting possible differences in linguistic styles between males and females has exercised linguistic researchers for decades (e.g. Trudgill 1972; Lakoff 1975; Labov 1990; Coates 1998). It has been argued for some time that some consistent differences exist in speech (as summarized in Holmes 1993), although the interpretation of such differences remains somewhat elusive. Most previous work has investigated apparent phonological and pragmatic differences between male and female language use in speech (e.g. Trudgill 1972; Key 1975; Holmes 1990; Labov 1990; Eckert 1997) and informal writing (such as student essays (Mulac et al 1990; Mulac & Lundell 1994) and electronic messaging (Herring 1996)). Several statistical phenomena have emerged that appear to be fairly stable across a variety of contexts. For example, females seem to talk more about relationships than do males (Aries & Johnson 1983; Tannen 1990) and use more compliments and apologies (Holmes 1988; Holmes 1989) and facilitative tag questions (Holmes 1984). Holmes (1993) has suggested that these and other phenomena might be generalized to a number of "universals" including that females are more attentive to the affective function of conversation and more prone to use linguistic devices that solidify relationships. However, interpretation of the underlying linguistic phenomena, particularly as regards their specific communicative functions, is the subject of considerable controversy (Bergvall et al 1996). For example, it has been argued (Cameron et al 1988) that the use of facilitative tag questions by women might be more plausibly interpreted as signs of conversational control than as signs of subordination, as had been previously contended (Lakoff 1975). Nevertheless, broadly speaking, the differences between female and male language use appear to be centered about the interaction between the linguistic actor and his or her linguistic context (the listener as well as the larger speech community). Hence it is not surprising that nearly all of the work on male/female linguistic difference has focused on speech and other high-interaction linguistic modalities (such as correspondence). Formal written texts such as books and articles, on the other hand, which are intended for a broad unseen audience, lack the intonational, phonological and conversational cues that are involved in speech and to a lesser extent in correspondence. One might therefore expect, especially in view of the interactional nature of the differences seen thus far between female and male language use, that such differences would be reduced or even eliminated in such formal written texts. Indeed, some authors (Berryman-Fink & Wilcox 1983; Simkins-Bullock & Wildman 1991) have asserted that no difference at all between male and female writing styles should be expected in more formal contexts. In this paper we explore possible variation between male and female writing styles in Modern English, by studying a large subset of the British National Corpus (BNC) covering a range of different genres. The documents included in this study are all articles and books intended for an unseen audience. Nevertheless, we will identify several classes of simple lexical and syntactic features whose occurrences in texts differ substantially according to author gender, both in fiction and in non-fiction. To foreshadow the main results, we will find significant differences between maleand female-authored documents in the use of personal pronouns and certain types of noun modifiers: although the total number of nominals used by male and female authors is virtually identical, females use many more pronouns and males use many more noun specifiers. Our main interest in this paper is to present the linguistic phenomena; we will endeavor, as far as possible, to avoid baseless speculation with regard to interpretation of the data. Nevertheless, the differences we consider between maleand female-authored documents represent related underlying phenomena. The categories of pronoun and specifier both encode information about the "things" of the world as they are presented in nominal groups (Halliday 1994). Pronouns send the message that the identity of the "thing" involved is known to the reader, while specifiers provide information about "things" that the writer assumes the reader does not know. Thus, one main locus of difference between men's and women's writing is the way the people, objects, collectives and institutions are presented. In particular, since we will see that it is specifically pronouns that refer to animate "things" that are used with greater frequency in female-authored documents, our results are consistent with earlier findings that men talk more about objects, while women talk more about relationships (Aries & Johnson 1983; Tannen 1990). We will see that our results are also consistent with earlier work on relatively small corpora of epistolary writing in the 17 and 20 centuries (Biber et al 1998; Palander-Collin 1999), in which a difference was found on the "involvement–informational" dimension (Biber 1995) with women's writing exhibiting more usage of features identified as "involved" and men's writing exhibiting more usage of features identified as informational". In fact, we will show that for each of a range of individual features which collectively constitute a good part of the "involvedness-informational" dimension, there are significant differences between male and female usage. The results reported here are particularly surprising because our corpus crosses several genres and thus, unlike a corpus of personal letters, should not be expected to implicate directly the social roles of the writers and the purposes of the texts. Moreover, in the texts examined here, the writers did not have a clear notion of the sex of the intended reader so that any differences in the properties of the writing must reflect characteristics of the writer rather than those of the reader Many of the differences we find hold both for fiction and for non-fiction. Interestingly, those features for which there are significant differences between male and female usage also tend to be those for which there are significant differences between non-fiction and fiction. Those features which are more prevalent in male writing are almost invariably more prevalent in nonfiction. At this stage it is premature to advance strong cognitive speculations as underlying the differences found in the corpus. It may well be that the differences reported here reflect subtle sociological effects that affect perceptions of self and perceptions of the world that are then encoded into the texts