Inhaltszusammenfassung

An area which still lacks satisfactory treatment in the literature on gender-differentiated language be-haviour are epistemic grounding strategies by means of adverbial clauses. Though claims as to the existence of sex differences in the use of subordination date back at least as far as the beginning of this century, there have been only few studies which approached this question empirically. Even more limited is the number of researchers who moved beyond the mere stating of sporadic quantita...An area which still lacks satisfactory treatment in the literature on gender-differentiated language be-haviour are epistemic grounding strategies by means of adverbial clauses. Though claims as to the existence of sex differences in the use of subordination date back at least as far as the beginning of this century, there have been only few studies which approached this question empirically. Even more limited is the number of researchers who moved beyond the mere stating of sporadic quantitative sex differences towards semantic and pragmatic analyses of sex-differentiated language use of subordinate clauses. The present paper introduces a new area of gender-linked syntactic variation in spoken discourse, i.e. the positioning of finite adverbial clauses. Empirical data will be provided to demonstrate that women, on the whole, use comparatively more finite adverbial clauses than men in the London-Lund Corpus of spoken British English. A semantic differentiation by clause-type into causal, conditional, purpose and concessive clauses will further buttress my claim that the female lead in overall usage of adverbial clauses can be attributed to factors which correlate with positioning. Women use comparatively more postposed clauses than their male counterparts, whereas men exhibit a statistically signi¬ficant preponderance in preposed clauses. The explanation of these phenomena will require an analysis of the functional properties of adverbial clauses as modifiers expressing epistemic modality and as discourse-structuring devices.» weiterlesen» einklappen

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DDC Sachgruppe:
Englisch