Language and Gender: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of British Politicians' Language Use

This dissertation examines British women and men politicians’ speech styles, with a focus on the use of “empty” adjectives, pronouns and hedging devices. The aim is to discover whether assumptions in existing literature regarding men’s and women’s speech styles can be confirmed through the analyses conducted in this dissertation. To provide new insights into the gender and language field, this thesis adopts a CADS approach, and employs the corpus tool Sketch Engine. To achieve this, the first analysis uses two small corpora, one composed of texts produced by 15 British women politicians, and the other of texts produced by British men politicians, consisting of interviews, political debates and speeches. The analysis investigates the use of “empty” adjectives, pronouns and hedging devices to uncover both differences and similarities, and to discover how these linguistic choices change based on the text’s genre. To confirm the findings from the initial analysis regarding the use of the aforementioned linguistic elements, a tailored British Hansard corpus is employed. It is divided into two corpora, one of speech produced by men politicians, and the other by women, each amounting to millions of words. The analysis conducted on the Hansard corpora did not focus on genres. The findings of the two analyses show that, at least for the period 2015-2023, British men and women politicians’ use of “empty” adjectives and hedging devices is similar, with no significant difference in use. The findings do not confirm some of the stereotypical assumptions of gendered speech styles. However, as regards pronouns, the two analyses produced contrasting results, thereby confirming some of the existing assumptions of gender-specific speech styles. Future research on this topic should focus of “gender-preferential” rather than “gender-exclusive” language, and the analysis of speech styles should consider a diverse array of factors, not limited solely to gender.