Gender related differences in using intensive adverbs in Turkish

Engin Evrim Önem

Abstract


This study aims to find out whether there is a gender based difference between male and female native speakers of Turkish in using intensive adverbs in Turkish. To achieve this, 182 voluntary native speakers of Turkish (89 female/93 male) with age ranging from 18 to 22 were asked to complete a photo description task. The task required choosing one of the statements in Turkish to describe twenty photos taken from International Affective Picture System (Lang, Bradley & Cuthbert, 2008). Each set of statements were nominal affirmative sentences and they included a description of the photo with a normal adjective and another one re-written to include an intensive adverb to modify the adjective in the previous statement. Results revealed no statistically significant difference between male and female participants in total. Yet, female participants used intensive adverbs more for certain photos. Discussion of the results and suggestions for future research are presented.

Keywords


Turkish; Intensive adverbs; Gender differences; Photo description task

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