"The kind of women who put '-ish' behind everything and 'sort of' in front of it": a study of sex differences in New Zealand English

Abstract

This thesis focuses on the interplay between language and sex in New Zealand. Within this very broad topic it is concerned with two things. Firstly, the testing of three interrelated hypotheses, ie. that speaker sex affects a person's speech, that the hearer's sex affects a person's speech, and that these two non-linguistic variables will show women use significantly more hedges than men, as has often been suggested in language and sex literature (Lakoff (1973,1975) has suggested hedges mark a speaker's insecurity or tentativeness and are a female speech characteristic). Secondly, this thesis gives a short description of the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of the hedges investigated. Results showed that 10 New Zealand university students (5 women, 5 men) in interviews where they described a picture to a male and then a female exhibited few differences in their use of NP hedges, quantity and number approximations and number specificity. Women used more specific number expressions, more quantity approximations and more post-NP hedges. Men used more approximations of number. Women used more approximations of number talking to a male than to a female, and men used more approximations of quantity talking to a male than to a female. Speech rate and amount of speech were also measured and compared. The women's amount of speech was greater than the men's. No difference in speech rate was found. The pragmatic discussion of the linguistic variables showed, among other things, that syntactic restrictions on the use of some hedges may be pragmatically motivated, and also that a number of hedges may co-occur, thus compounding their effect. I argue that implicatures are an important means by which hedges are understood. In conclusion, possible avenues for further research are given.