Gender-specific Features in Lithuanian Parliamentary Discourse : An Interdisciplinary Sociolinguistic and Corpus-based Study

The article tackles the questions of whether the general public agrees to the existence of gender-specific linguistic differences in political discourse, what language use is considered by the general public as gender-specific, and whether the methods of corpus linguistics support the indicated differences. Two theoretical and methodological frameworks are used in the study: the framework of a sociolinguistic inquiry and the framework of corpus linguistics. For the sociolinguistic inquiry a questionnaire was prepared and distributed among university students, the current respondents. In the context of corpus linguistics, answers by the respondents were checked quantitatively in two separate corpora of parliamentary debates. The sociolinguistic inquiry has revealed that the majority of the respondents believe that there are differences in the way male and female politicians speak. Nevertheless, when asked to indicate the gender of the politicians from the extracts of their discourse, the respondents have been unsuccessful in more cases than they have succeeded in completing the task. The corpus-based analysis supported some of the respondents’ expectations as to the gender-specific language use in political communications and refuted the others. It has shown that the gender-related language variation in political communication does not follow a dichotomous patternVytauto Didžiojo universiteta