A study on gender differences in the length of requests in Turkish

Engin Evrim Önem

Abstract


Gender can be considered as an important variable in language use and research suggest that men and women use language differently. Speech acts is not an exception. This study aims to find out whether gender plays a role in making requests. To analyze this, a Discourse Completion Task in Turkish consisting of five situations was given to 54 students (30 male / 24 female) studying at a state university and were asked to write how they would make requests for each situation. Then, the number of the words used for each requests and in total were calculated and compared according to the gender of the participants. The results of the independent samples t-test showed a statistically significant difference between the female and male participants in the number of words used in total and for each request, in favor of females. The results are parallel with the previous research suggesting that women have a tendency to include more details and men tend to be more direct. Discussion of the results and implications for future studies are presented in the final section.


Keywords


Indirect speech acts; politeness ;requests; gender differences; word count

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References


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