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Article published In: Language and Gender in the Australian Context
Edited by Joanne Winter and Gillian Wigglesworth
[Australian Review of Applied Linguistics. Series S 10] 1993
► pp. 147–179

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Gender differences in spoken interaction in same sex dyadic conversations in Australian English

 | Sydney University
Published online: 1 January 1993
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https://doi.org/10.1075/aralss.10.07thw
Abstract
This paper is a quantitative study of gender differences in a corpus of spontaneous spoken discourse of approximately 2000 clauses. Subjects were same sex pairs of speakers of Australian English, from a sample that was homogeneous in all respects except gender. Grammatical analyses derive from the work of Halliday, with conversational analyses developed by Berry (1981a,b,c) and Martin (1992). Results show that statistically significant gender differences occurred in the phonological, lexicogrammatical and semantic strata of the language. A Systemic Functional model was found to be most useful in capturing these differences, and in relating them in a holistic picture of this type of language variation.
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