Women’s and men’s style: fact or fiction? New grammatical evidence

The idea that there is a gender-specific style of writing has been around for a long time in literary studies. In linguistics there is also a fairly long-standing tradition of talking about women’s language or women’s style, but the focus of this line of research has traditionally been speech rather than writing. So far, empirical studies have focussed on phonological aspects (e.g. Trudgill’s, Milroy’s or Cheshire’s well-known work), lexical aspects (“women’s words”, cf. Lakoff 1975 or Schmid’s contribution to Corpus Linguistics 2001 to be published in the Leech-Festschrift), and especially on styles of discourse and discourse behaviour (“women’s cooperative style”, Tannen, Coates, Mulac and others). Investigations of grammatical aspects of gender-specific language have typically looked at questions, especially tag-questions, and a small number of other grammatical features that were envisaged to provide surface evidence for underlying gender-specific discourse styles. These handpicked areas aside, grammatical markers of gender-specific style have hardly been studied so far.