Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research (아시아태평양코퍼스연구)

Institute for Corpus Research (국립인천대학교 코퍼스연구소)
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Gender-Based Differences in Expository Language Use: A Corpus Study of Japanese

  • Received : 2020.10.28
  • Accepted : 2020.12.16
  • Published : 2020.12.31
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Abstract

Previous work has shown that men both explain and value the act of explaining more than women, as explaining conveys expertise. However, previous studies are limited to English. We conducted an exploratory study to see if similar patterns are seen amongst Japanese speakers. We examined three registers of Japanese: conversational interviews, simulated speeches, and academic presentations. For each text, we calculated two measures: lexical density and the percentage of the text written in kanji. Both are indicators of expository language. Men produced significantly higher scores for the interviews and speeches. However, the results for the presentations depend on age and academic field. In fields in which women are the minority, women produce higher scores. In the field in which men are the minority, younger men produced higher scores but older men produced lower scores than women of the same age. Our results show that in academic contexts, the explainers are not necessarily men but rather the gender minority. We argue that such speakers are under social pressure to present themselves as experts. These results show that the generalization that men tend to explain more than women does not always hold true, and we urge more academic work on expository language.

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Acknowledgement

This research was sponsored by Grant in Aid for Scientific Research (C) 17K02761 from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. We thank the participants of the NWAV-AP 2020 Tokyo conference for feedback.

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