Inhaltszusammenfassung

While recent decades have witnessed an upsurge in research on gender and language, empirical investigations of gender differences in the area of syntax are still at a premium. The present article's objective is to combine corpus-linguistic methodology with the theoretical framework provided by functional grammar in order to explore an area of marked gender differences in syntax, i.e. epistemic grounding strategies by means of adverbial clauses. The fact that the ability to encode epistemic me...While recent decades have witnessed an upsurge in research on gender and language, empirical investigations of gender differences in the area of syntax are still at a premium. The present article's objective is to combine corpus-linguistic methodology with the theoretical framework provided by functional grammar in order to explore an area of marked gender differences in syntax, i.e. epistemic grounding strategies by means of adverbial clauses. The fact that the ability to encode epistemic meaning is an underlying characteristic of linguistic items that prove to be sensitive to gender, has already been shown by Holmes (1990) for tag questions and hedges as well as by Preisler (1986) and Coates (1987) for modal verbs. The quantitative and qualitative in-depth analysis of syntactic variation in the use of four types of finite adverbial clauses according to gender in the London-Lund Corpus not only provides verifiable data on statistically significant differences, but is also able to provide a more realistic point of departure for future theory-building. Moreover, it is able to reconcile apparently contradictory results of studies on gender-differentiated language use conducted so far. The semantic types investigated are causal conditional concessive purpose clauses. A careful breakdown of the data according to a range of factors, such as semantic type and position allows us to discern the underlying motivation for the observed sex-differentiated use of adverbial clauses. The results will be analysed with a view to several tenets postulated in Expectation States Theory. » weiterlesen» einklappen

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Englisch