A Gender Difference Study On Stance Markers In British Spoken English Corpus

Recent years have witnessed increasing studies on stance, and it nearly becomes an independent study field in linguistic research. The stance studies abroad are mainly concentrated on contrastive studies while studies at home generally focus on stance use of language learners. Moreover, compared with stance studies overseas, studies at home seldom touch upon the influence of gender on stance use. As men and women have different tendencies in stance use, this paper will discuss the comparison of stance markers used in spoken English from perspective of gender, which would shed light on the teaching of stance expression in verbal English.The newly-built stance theory is mainly based on the stance theory proposed by Hyland and combined with related stance studies by Biber, Wu and He, thus this stance theory is a more comprehensive one. In this study, stance markers are divided into four major groups and further categorized into seven sub-groups. The characteristics of each group will then be discussed in these two levels. Moreover, stance markers in this study are selected based on the common stance markers proposed by Precht.The corpus used in this thesis is a sub-corpus of BNC web, S: conv. It consists of 3,718,438 words spoken by 1,068 members, among which 509 are male and 559 are female. The spoken material mostly comes from daily conversations and talks, which are characterized with impromptuness and can directly reflect the use of stance markers by native speakers. The data analyzed in the study is raw frequency, standard frequency(frequency per million words), chi-square value, p value, the significance of p value and mutual information value.The study findings are elaborated in the macroscopic and microscopic way. In macroscopic view, the major differences of stance markers in gender language are shown in attitudinal stance markers and self-mention stance markers. The frequencies of stance markers by men and women show that women are more inclined to make stance expression and their stance markers are seldom influenced by their ages or social classes. In microscopic view, different genders have distinct characteristics in hedges, boosters, attitudinal stance markers and self-mention stance markers. In the use of hedges, women tend to use approximators while men prefer shields. In the use of boosters, female's boosters have diverse grammatical forms while men's boosters are mostly adverbs. In the use of attitudinal stance markers, men are more likely to use curse words while women tend to use affection expression. In the use of self-mention stance markers, women use more self-mention stance markers than men, yet women in high social class use them less frequently.This study straightens out specific linguistic features of stance markers by native speakers, which can shed light on the study of the stance markers in oral English language teaching and research.