The influence of gender in the use of verbal courtesy

The objective of the essay is to discover whether gender is a variable that affects the way to apply one of the pragmatics fields, that is, the verbal courtesy. In the second aspect, the aim also consists in exploring which of the different courtesy strategies each gender tends to use. At last, the purpose is also to analyse and determine if the application of the verbal courtesy between men and women change according to the geographic location. To be able to conduct the essay, a survey will be distributed at the University of Stockholm and at the University of Malaga. The survey contains questions which alternatives are related to the different courtesy strategies, which will make it possible to establish men and women’s ways of using verbal courtesy respectively.This research illustrates that the utilization of the verbal courtesy differs between men and women since they use the courtesy strategies with a different frequency. Nevertheless, there is not a marked difference since they both tend to use the same strategies. In addition, the result also shows that women use more often than men three of the strategies that have the major focus on the politeness. It furthermore shows that men tend to use a strategy that is a more direct way of making speech acts, comparing to women. Ultimately, there is a difference of the use of verbal courtesy between the people of each gender more noticeable in the University of Stockholm, due to the strategy that men use the least, off-record, is not corresponding to the one that women are using the least, which is bald on-record