Linguistic Expression and Gender: A Function Word Analysis of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Authors

Erica Corbiere, Cedarville UniversityFollow

Document Type

Capstone Project

Submission Date

2016

Keywords

Gender, language, LIWC, Austen

Abstract

The current study investigates ten dimensions of female and male categories of speech, which focus on function words, as previously identified by Newman et al. (2008). Through the use of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count tool (using the LIWC2015 dictionary), these ten categories were analyzed in the dialogue of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Results were consistent with previous findings by Newman et al. (2008). Four of five previously identified categories as more often used by male speakers (numbers, words per sentence, prepositions, articles, and words greater than six letters) were used with an even greater difference between Austen’s male and female characters. Four of five previously identified female categories of language (use of more negative emotion words, verbs, certainty words, negations, and personal pronouns) were also consistent with the Newman (2008) study and again revealed greater disparity between male and female usage. Results contribute to the idea that Jane Austen intentionally wrote character dialogue along gender language dimensions and to the argument that gendered language differences have long existed in the English language.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Corbiere, Erica, "Linguistic Expression and Gender: A Function Word Analysis of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice" (2016). Linguistics Senior Research Projects. 5.
https://digitalcommons.cedarville.edu/linguistics_senior_projects/5