Are genderlects universal? An English-Polish contrastive study
Marta Dabrowska
Jagiellonian University
The paper focuses on the issue of differences in the language use by men and women, respectively. Decades of research concerning this problem have produced a fairly long list of items characteristic of one gender or the other thereby justifying the coinage of the term ‘genderlect’, this claim, however, can be supported predominantly by the samples collected in the English-speaking societies. The question of women’s language has not as yet featured prominently in Polish sociolinguistics, the existing studies offering but a very general account of gender differences in language. In view of this, the following is an attempt to throw more light on the issue. To this end, some aspects of linguistic behaviour of men and women – native speakers of English and Polish, will be examined, on the assumption that that gender differences in the use of language will be encountered in the case of both nationalities, though to a varying degree. This, on the other hand, will be linked with the cultural differences between the English and the Polish speakers. Analysed will be some samples of speech collected by means of the elicitation technique consisting in describing a visual prompt (a picture), which will make it possible to investigate such aspects of language use as, among others, the duration of speech, attitude of the speaker (objective description vs. evaluation), the presence of hesitation and hedging devices, sensitivity to detail and colour, the level of language (literary vs. colloquial), the use of diminutives (Polish speakers) and others.
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