ARE WE DIFFERENT? MALE AND FEMALE “REGISTERS” IN CHINESE CORPUS DATA

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine language data with regard to potential differences between male and female registers. Corpus linguistics is used as the basic methodological approach (mostly quantitative) to the topic and the Hanku corpus, more particularly the subcorpus Litchi, are used as the primary source of language data. The data are presented in the form of tables together with a brief analysis. The results indicate a considerable variation between male vs. female registers in some areas – lexicon, part-of-speech proportion etc. However in other areas (e.g. prosody) there exists no deviation at all. These indicators of variation will be subject of further, more detailed research.