An Investigation of Different Language Choice through Personal Pronouns in the Twitter

An Investigation of Different Language Choice through Personal Pronouns Indonesian Journal of EFL and Linguistics Vol. 2 No. 1, 2017 eISSN: 2503-4197, pISSN: 2527-5070 www. indonesian-efl-journal.org An Investigation of Different Language Choice through Personal Pronouns in the Twitter Nur Hafiz Abdurahman LPDP Awardee, Universitas Tanjungpura, Indonesia e-mail: Abstract: This study aimed to find evidence regarding the use of personal pronouns in the discourses produced by males and females. Personal pronouns were chosen as the object of analysis, as several studies has suggested them as one of the features that may distinguish the gender of the authors. This study analysed publically available corpus, Rovereto Twitter N-Gram Corpus (RTC), utilized by Herdagdelen (2013). It is gender-of-the-author tagged, which makes the author’s gender analysis easier. The corpus was analysed using AntConc (Anthony, 2014). From AntConc’s concordance analysis, it was found that women utilised more personal pronouns, especially the ones that can create closer bond. On the other hand, men have greater tendency to distant themselves using generic pronouns than women. In conclusion, men and women in this study may use personal pronouns differently. Keywords: Personal Pronoun, Twitter, AntConc Indonesian Journal of EFL and Linguistics, Vol. 2 (1), 2017 1 An Investigation of Different Language Choice through Personal Pronouns 1. INTRODUCTION In academic writing, different language choices are almost invisible. On the other hand, informal conversation can usually depict the different involvedness level of gender because of its ‘interactional nature’ (Argamon et al., 2003, p. 322). In English articles written by Persian speakers, female writers used the same pattern as their native counterparts, while male ones were affected mostly by their native language (Seyyedrezaie and Vahedi, 2017). In addition, Hosseini and Tammimy (2016) and Jasmani, et al. (2011) found that verbs and pronouns may also provide distinctive gender-oriented information. For these reasons, I intend to investigate the different utilisation of language by men and women through Twitter which is increasingly popular and provides more natural interaction unlike other written discourses such as essays. The strength of Twitter, therefore, is it may provide a natural condition for people to either be ‘involved’ or ‘informative’ (Argamon et al., 2003) in their produced-tweets without being afraid to be interrupted. The study of how gender distinguish the language utilisation has been in the spotlight since Lakoff’s (1975). From then, many researchers have tried to find evidence that gender plays an important role in the produced discourse (Tannen, 1994; Cameron, 2003; Talbot, 2003; Cunha et al., 2014). These studies found that men tend to be more straightforward than women. Nonetheless, Cameron (2003, p. 465) noted that the language and gender stereotypes ‘has often begun from folklinguistic stereotypes’. Thus, a research is often set by an agenda, and the results cannot avoid to recirculate these stereotypes. This article, as a result, admits that this study also fell into the similar paradox. Nonetheless, it is important to note that this study does not deny other possible factors that may affect the language utilised in the data. This paper has two key aims. Firstly, to find evidence whether involved features, particularly personal pronouns, are more frequent in women-authored discourses as found in many studies (Argamon et al., 2003; Argamon et al., 2007; Newman et al., 2008; Bamman et al., 2014). Secondly, I will address how each gender utilises language through frequent collocation of the most common personal pronouns. One thing to note, however, is that this paper only aims to present phenomena as additional evidence of gender differences in Twitter. Thus, it does not necessarily mean that gender is the distinguishing factor in discourse. 1.1 Research Questions There has been much literature providing evidence that men and women use different linguistic features in their discourses, especially in social media. It is also evident that personal pronouns are more favourable by females (Hosseini and Tammimy, 2016). Nevertheless, it is rare to find how these devices and the semantic preferences accompanying them differ between genders. Therefore, the following research questions will guide my study: - Do females from Herdagdelen’s (2003) Rovereto Twitter N-Gram Corpus (RTC) use personal pronouns in their tweets more than males? Indonesian Journal of EFL and Linguistics, Vol. 2 (1), 2017 2 An Investigation of Different Language Choice through Personal Pronouns - If yes, how do their language choices through the utilisation of personal pronouns differ? 2. LITERATURE REVIEW 2.1 Approaches to Language and Gender Language and gender have been studied by many researchers using various approaches. The first is deficit approach, labelled to Lakoff’s (1975) Language and Woman’s Place. Lakoff (1975) mainly discussed women’s language in everyday conversation. This approach sees women as a weaker group and is often criticised because it indirectly suggests women to ‘speak like men if they want to be taken seriously’ (Coates, 2004, p. 6). The second approach is the dominance approach which still sees women as the oppressed group (Coates, 2004). Unlike the previous approaches, the third approach sees that men and women are two different values; thus, they speak differently (Coates, 2004, p. 6). In this approach, each gender was seen equal, and any differences that occur are due to the gender’s ‘culture’ differences, not their social position. Although the difference approach is greatly criticised when it is applied to the talk among people of different genders (Coates, 2004, p. 6), Cameron (1992, p. 61) argued that gender is a social construction itself. In other words, just like how people of different cultures may speak and use similar language differently, men’s and women’s using language differently should be seen as a distinguishable social phenomenon. For this reason, dynamic approach – social constructionism – then emerged. It is suggested from the fourth approach that language should not be dichotomized based on masculine/feminine point of view; nevertheless, I will adopt different approach because I would like to see the differences in the tweets produced by each gender. However, this preference does not mean that I agree that men and women in general speak differently. It is merely due to the limitation of the data, postings in Twitter, which only has one social variable, gender. 2.2 Discourse and Corpus Before moving further into the use tweets as a written discourse, the definition of discourse and corpus will first be discussed. Discourse is the produced language used in communication. Cameron and Panovic (2014, 3-4) summarised three possible definitions of discourse: (1) ‘language above the sentence’; (2) ‘languag (...truncated)