A Gender Study Of Intensifiers And Their Collocations In Online Forums

Based on the self-built corpora with the samples collected from eight males and females’ online forums, the present study carried out a sociolinguistic study on intensifiers, one of the important linguistic variations, which are supposed to be used differently across genders. At the same time, their collocations have also been examined under the framework of appraisal theory. The samples were collected from forums specific for single gender discussions. All the posts were released from 2012 to 2014.The study mainly answered three questions. The first question was seeking to answer whether the intensifiers distributed differently in the posts contributed by different genders. The second question was centered on whether the differences in topics can affect the intensifier distribution. The third question examined the attitudinal factors in the intensifiers and their collocations. The explanations of this question are associated with the attitudinal evaluation which is a part of appraisal theory.The examination of the distribution of the intensifiers was mainly conducted through quantitative approaches, in which statistics such as frequencies and LL scores were calculated. In the process of analyzing the link between intensifiers and attitudes, both quantitative and qualitative methods were employed. The distribution of intensifiers according to different types of attitudes was part of the quantitative analysis, while the detailed analysis of the contexts with intensifiers embedded in was related to the qualitative analysis.The study found that although the distribution of some intensifiers did have significant differences across genders, it also changed dramatically with the topic differences. In the quantitative analysis of attitudinal distribution of the intensifiers,not many gender differences were detected. But, with the assistance of qualitativeanalysis, the study did find that the way of males and females expressing their attitudes was different. The final conclusion was drawn to support the viewpoint that there are more similarities than differences across genders.By carrying out this research, whether the intensifiers are gender oriented language indicators was well examined. Also, both genders’ ways of expressing attitude were discussed. However, in the present study, only one social variable,gender, was taken into consideration. This is considered to be the biggest limitation because sometimes other factors, such as age and occupations, can also play a role in the distribution of intensifiers as well as the conveying of attitude.