A Key Word Analysis of English Intensifying Adverbs in Male and Female Speech in ICE-GB

A Key Word Analysis of English Intensifying Adverbs in Male and Female Speech in ICE-GB ∗∗∗∗ Jieun Jeon and Jae-Woong Choe Department of Linguistics, Korea University, Anam-dong Seongbuk-gu, Seoul and 136-701, Korea {jejeon, jchoe}@korea.ac.kr Abstract. Lakoff (1975), a pioneering study of women’s language, suggested a tendency for women to use more of hedges and intensifiers. Subsequent studies still attract some opposing (Fahy, 2002; Nemati and Bayer, 2007) or reinforcing (Bradac et al., 1995; Navalainen, 2008) views. This paper shows how a key word analysis offers an empirical evidence on the use of intensifying adverbs in male and female speech based on ICE-GB. We use the KeyWords facility in WordSmith tools (Scott, 1999) which has been used in several studies as means for describing the characteristics of different genres (Sardinha, 2000; Culpeper, 2002, 2009; Xiao and McEnery, 2005). One of the issues with respect to using KeyWords facility is the selection of the most appropriate reference corpus. Therefore, another goal of this paper is to test several possibilities for the selection of the appropriate reference corpus for key word analysis in terms of its size and composition. Keywords: Intensifying Adverbs, ICE-GB, WordSmith, Key word, Reference corpus ∗ We are grateful to Dr. Seungwan Ha and anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. All the remaining errors, of course, are solely our responsibility. This work was supported by Brain Korea 21 Project. Copyright 2009 by Jieun Jeon and Jae-Woong Choe 1 Introduction One of the characteristic features of women’s speech, according to Lakoff (1975:53-54), is that women use, among others, hedges such as well, y’know, kinda and intensive so more frequently than men. Quirk and Greenbaum (1973) calls them “adverbial qualification” as being points on an intensity scale which may be high or low. For example, in (1a), very, so, quite heighten or amplify the semantic meaning of the assertion, while in (1b), a bit, sort of, kind of decrease the force of assertion. (1) a. He is (very/so/quite) reasonable. b. He is (a bit/sort of/kind of) reasonable. Intensifiers in (1a) express the speaker’s strong commitment, and those in (1b) express the speaker’s reluctance to commit to the validity of that assertion. In this paper, we will refer to them as “intensifying adverbs.” Lakoff (1975:66) claims that the tentativeness and powerless of women’s language reflected in heavy use of intensifying adverbs. Her pioneering work provided one of the most influential momenta in the feminist movement (Coates and Cameron, 1988). However, it also started a hot controversy regarding the validity of her linguistic observations and claims. Dubois and Crouch (1975:289), for example, criticized that her investigative method is introspective, asystematic, uncontrolled, and unverifiable observation. The controversy is still alive as Lakoff and Bucholtz (2004) shows, and we can still find some subsequent studies that supports 210 23rd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, pages 210–219 (Bradac et al., 1995; Navalainen, 2008) or disapproves (Fahy, 2002; Nemati and Bayer, 2007) Lakoff’s linguistic generalizations, if not her feministic interpretation of them. The purpose of …

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