| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 88 === In the field of sociolinguistics, many studies have been conducted to investigate the differences between women’s and men’s conversational styles. In these studies, the language in question is usually English and the data collected from conversations in real life. Little effort has been made to look at the talk taking place on BBS, which has become a craze among young people lately in Taiwan. Therefore, this study aims to understand whether there is any difference between women’s and men’s talk on BBS and, if there is, to explain how and why they are different.
Twenty mixed-sex BBS conversation records were obtained by the courtesy of 20 BBS users. These conversation records were coded through six variables: amount of speech, minimal responses, laughs, final particles, emoticons, and creative language use. Creative language use is classified into three categories, i.e., phonetic symbols used as characters, newly-coined phrases or transliterations, and Taiwanese accent mimicries. The major findings are encapsulated in the following.
1. Little difference was found between women and men in the amount of talk. On average, women and men were found to contribute almost the same amount of characters, turns, and mean length of a turn (MLT).
2. Ten men were found to use more minimal responses than women, but on average men used 35% more minimal responses than women.
3. On average, men laughed 16.1 times during the conversation while their counterparts laughed only 13.6 times, which was a 15.6% difference.
4. Final particle is the only variable that men produced less than women in this study, but the difference is not very significant. Women on average attached 40.0 final particles to the end of their utterances, while men did that 6.35% less frequently, averaging 37.4 only.
5. Men were found to use 28.9% more emoticons to express their feelings than were women. However, 60% of the subjects did not use any emoticons and only 25% of them used more than one emoticon, which suggested that the use of emoticons was actually not a common practice on BBS.
6. Males were found to substitute 33.4% more phonetic symbols for Chinese characters, 46.2% more new phrases or transliterations, and 55.7% more Taiwanese accent mimicries. In total, men showed a 39.8% higher tendency to be creative in their language.
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