The effect of gender on language use in British novels: A sociolinguistic study

Abstract

The present study investigates the effect of the social variable, such as gender on language use in British novels. Precisely, it attempts to achieve the following aims: (1) Identifying the influence of the social variable, like gender on the linguistic choices of language used in British novels; (2) Finding out the differences and similarities in the use of transitivity's process types in the language of the novels by the British male and female narrators; (3) comparing the language use between the two selected samples in the light of the micro and macro linguistic strategies.

To achieve the aims of this study, it is hypothesized that: (1) Gender affects the linguistic choices in language of the British novels; (2) Generally, there are apparent differences and similarities between the two selected data in using some linguistic choices like material, mental, attributive-relational, and identifying-relational processes; (3) The British female narration tends to use the psychological processes more than the male one.

After all tasks of data collection were accomplished, the first step in analyzing the collected data began with analyzing the language of the two British novels which the researcher dealt with in this study using three analytical models through which the eclectic model was designed so as to achieve the objectives of the current study. For the purpose of analysis, two British novels were analyzed at micro and macro levels. At micro-level, lexical features based on Halliday's (2004) model, and grammatical features based on Quirk's (1985) framework, were analyzed. This was followed by the analysis of micro-level (superstructure) based on Labov's (1972) model.