A corpus Analysis of Male, Female, and Queer Speech

10th Conference for the American Association for Corpus Linguistics

October 7th Friday

Caskey, Forrest at Western Carolina University

Topic: A corpus Analysis of Male, Female, and Queer Speech

     According to Caskey (2010), the study about queer speech or gender linguistics has been mainly qualitative and theoretical. Referring to empirical and quantitative data provided by numerous scholars like Jacobs, Stokoe, Busholtz, and Lakoff, Caskey researched on recording and transcribing conversation of hetero or gay men and women for two years. To create a corpus of male, female, and queer speech, Caskey categorizaed queer conversation with different patterns as follows.

1. Hetero men talking
2. Hetero women talking
3. Hetero woman – man talking
4. Gay men talking
5. Gay women talking
6. Gay men with hetero man talking

     Most of all, I was very interested in the topic, and the method of study was interesting as well. Caskey especially studied on the discourse elements and discourse strategies. The discourse elements include topic choice, method of holding the floor using hedges, tags, back channels, and interruptions. His interest was to recognize linguistic and discourse features which can discriminate speech according to genders or sexuality. The results suggested by Caskey are as follows.

1. “Queer male speech appears to be more aligned with hetero male speech while from a linguistic paradigm queer male speech aligns closer to female speech.”

2. “Designation of femininity of queer male speech was misleading.”                           Caskey (2010)

This study could be very meaningful in the corpus research area since there was little study based on the quantitative research or corpus analysis.