Article |
| Asia Pacific Journal of Corpus Research Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 1-14 |
| Abbreviation: APJCR |
| e-ISSN: 2733-8096 |
| Publication date: 31 December 2020 |
| Received: 28 October 2020 / Received in Revised Form: 7 December 2020 / Accepted: 16 December 2020 |
| DOI: https://doi.org/10.22925/apjcr.2020.1.2.1
|
Gender-Based Differences in Expository Language Use: A Corpus Study of Japanese |
| Kevin Heffernan (Kwansei Gakuin University) Keiko Nishino (Kwansei Gakuin University) |
| Copyright 2020 APJCR
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0, which permits unrestricted, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Abstract |
| Previous work has shown that men both explain and value the act of explaining more than women, as explaining conveys expertise. However, previous studies are limited to English. We conducted an exploratory study to see if similar patterns are seen amongst Japanese speakers. We examined three registers of Japanese: conversational interviews, simulated speeches, and academic presentations. For each text, we calculated two measures: lexical density and the percentage of the text written in kanji. Both are indicators of expository language. Men produced significantly higher scores for the interviews and speeches. However, the results for the presentations depend on age and academic field. In fields in which women are the minority, women produce higher scores. In the field in which men are the minority, younger men produced higher scores but older men produced lower scores than women of the same age. Our results show that in academic contexts, the explainers are not necessarily men but rather the gender minority. We argue that such speakers are under social pressure to present themselves as experts. These results show that the generalization that men tend to explain more than women does not always hold true, and we urge more academic work on expository language. |
Keywords |
| Gender, Academic, Expository, Hypercorrection, Information Density |
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The Authors’ Addresses |
| First and Corresponding Author Kevin Heffernan Professor School of Policy Studies Kwansei Gakuin University 2-1 Gakuen, Sanda, Hyogo 669-1337, JAPAN E-mail: kevin@kwansei.ac.jp Co-author Keiko Nishino Professor School of Policy Studies Kwansei Gakuin University 2-1 Gakuen, Sanda, Hyogo 669-1337, JAPAN E-mail: cia49965@kwansei.ac.jp |
