Gender Differences in the Use of Pronouns in Asynchronous Computer-Mediated Communication

A Corpus-Based Analysis of Pakistani English E-Newspaper Blogosphere

  • Ibrar Hussain Khan Department of English, International Islamic University Islamabad
  • Muhammad Amjad Department of English, International Islamic University Islamabad
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54487/jcp.v2i2.1549

Abstract

This paper analyses gender differences in the use of pronouns by men and women bloggers of five leading Pakistani English e-newspaper blogs. For this purpose, 11258 blog posts from 1674 men and 1212 women bloggers were collected and two gendered corpora, comprising around nine million tokens (men=5.6 million; women=3.3 million), were built and subjected to analysis with the help of two automated text analysis tools: Linguistics Inquiry and Word Count 2015 and AntConc 3.4.4. Preliminary results, so obtained, were further worked out for descriptive and inferential statistics with XLSTAT and MS Excel. The results show that preference for pronouns is a gender marker in a text while results for particular pronouns vary. The examination of frequencies, concordances and collocates of various pronouns also revealed some other similarities, differences and cultural nuances in gendered language.
Keywords: Language and Gender, Computer Mediated Communication, Pakistani English E-Newspaper

Published
2021-03-09
Issue
Vol. 2 No. 2 (2018): Journal of Contemporary Poetics
Section
Articles

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