A Sociolinguistic Study of the Effect of Gender on Language Use in the American novels: The Unvanquished & Gone with The Wind.

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of the social variable, such as gender on language use in the American novels. Precisely, it attempts to achieve the following aims: (1) Identifying the influence of the social variable, like gender on the linguistic choices of language used in American novels; (2) Finding out the similarities and differences in the use of lexicalization in the language of the novels by the American male and female narrators; (3) comparing the language use between the two selected samples in the light of the micro and macro linguistic strategies. To achieve the aims of this study, it is hypothesized that: (1) Gender affects the linguistic choices in language of the American novels; (2) Generally, there are apparent differences and similarities between the two selected data in using some linguistic choices like formal and informal expressions, overuse and rewording items, and negative and positive evaluation, and; (3) The American female narrator tends to use the negative expressions more than the male one. After all tasks of data collection were accomplished, the first step in analyzing the collected data began with analyzing the language of the two American novels which the researcher dealt with in this study using three analytical models through which the eclectic model was designed so as to confirm the objectives of this study. For the purpose of analysis, two American novels were analyzed at the two linguistic levels; micro and macro. At micro-linguistic level, lexical features depend of (Fairclough, 1989) model. This was followed by the analysis of micro-level (superstructure) based on (Labov, 1972)) model.