Pick a Fight or Bite your Tongue: Investigation of Gender Differences in Idiomatic Language Usage (2020.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on gender-linked language have established foundations regarding cross-gender differences in lexical, emotional, and topical preferences, along with their sociological underpinnings. |
| Approach: | They compile a corpus of spontaneous linguistic productions annotated with speakers’ gender and perform an empirical study of gender differences in the usage of figurative language between male and female authors. |
| Outcome: | The results show that gender-specific idiomatic choices reflect gender-based lexical and semantic preferences in general language, men's and women's idioms express higher emotion than their literal language, and contextual analysis of idiomatic expressions reveals considerable differences, reflecting subtle divergences in usage environments, shaped by cross-gender communication styles and semantic biases. |
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