Suchergebnisse

Our starting point is that there are gender differences in the use of language linked to masculine/feminine role identity, and not to alleged essentialist, intrinsic features. The research is a contribution to the understanding of links between linguistic behaviors and socio-psychological processes, as these relate to agency and ingroup/outgroup differentiation and to gender roles. We conducted our descriptive study on 441 parliamentary speeches delivered between 1976 and 2009 by four Italian politicians, differentiated by gender and political affiliation. We expected a higher degree of agency as well as higher ingroup/outgroup differentiation for male than for female politicians with a trend towards a lesser degree of gender differences in the later period (1994-2009) because of the feminine emancipatory processes in the Italian society and parliament. The indicators of high/low agency were: pronouns and verbs in the first person singular/plural, and conditional modal verbs. For the ingroup/outgroup differentiation, we used pronouns in the first and second person plural. We conducted a quantitative textual analysis and a qualitative contextual analysis. Our results confirm the hypothesis in part. We advanced some contextualist considerations to interpret the outcomes.

The most recent literature on gender differences in language use has shown that the Italian political communication enacted by men and women parliamentarians only partly reflects and reproduces the asymmetries and stereotypes widespread in society. Starting from an anti-essentialist perspective, which holds that language differences between men and women speakers are much less extensive than claimed in the past, we analysed 463 parliamentary speeches in the course of the XIVth legislature (5-2001 / 4-2006) in four parliamentarian pairs, differentiated by gender and political orientation. The general aim was to explore the socio-psychological constructs of agency and ingroup/outgroup dynamics as revealed by linguistic behaviour in men/women parliamentarians. The two constructs were detected by specific linguistic markers in the interventions of men/women parliamentarian pairs. Specifically, for agency, we detected: (1a) pronoun variations between singular and plural first person (I, we); (1b) amplitude of we as either specific or superordinate; (1c) conditional modal form of verbs. For ingroup/outgroup dynamics, we detected: (2a) pronoun variation between first and second plural person (we vs. you) and (2b) their valence. Lexicographical analysis was carried out with statistical packages TaLTaC2 and TreeTagger on a corpus of 432,671 words. Chi-square and z-test were applied to word frequencies, while Student's t-tests were applied to gender comparisons. The results showed reduced variability between men/women parliamentarians in the use of linguistic devices, confirming the weakness of the essentialist and binary logic that has long dominated the field of studies on language and gender.