Gender Differences in Usage of Interrogative Utterances in Everyday English (on the Material of the Spoken BNC2014 Corpus)

This research aims to investigate gender differences in the use of interrogative sentences in informal dyadic conversations of British English speakers. Using Alice Freed’s [1994] question taxonomy, functional question types were determined, whose distribution according to both the speaker’s and addressee’s gender was considered. The analysis has revealed that women use more questions which are a part of reported speech, especially in same-sex conversations, which is possibly explained by the proposition that women tend to prefer private, or rapport-talk. Differences in the use of deictic information questions and social invitations were also found. Additionally, a broad analysis of tag question distribution has shown that men used more tag questions and almost 3/4 of them were directed toward women, which proves once again that tags are not a feature of only women’s language.