Pick a Fight or Bite your Tongue: Investigation of Gender Differences in Idiomatic Language Usage

Ella Rabinovich, Hila Gonen, Suzanne Stevenson


Abstract
A large body of research on gender-linked language has established foundations regarding cross-gender differences in lexical, emotional, and topical preferences, along with their sociological underpinnings. We compile a novel, large and diverse corpus of spontaneous linguistic productions annotated with speakers’ gender, and perform a first large-scale empirical study of distinctions in the usage of figurative language between male and female authors. Our analyses suggest that (1) idiomatic choices reflect gender-specific lexical and semantic preferences in general language, (2) men’s and women’s idiomatic usages express higher emotion than their literal language, with detectable, albeit more subtle, differences between male and female authors along the dimension of dominance compared to similar distinctions in their literal utterances, and (3) contextual analysis of idiomatic expressions reveals considerable differences, reflecting subtle divergences in usage environments, shaped by cross-gender communication styles and semantic biases.
Anthology ID:
2020.coling-main.454
Volume:
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Donia Scott, Nuria Bel, Chengqing Zong
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
International Committee on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5181–5192
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.454
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.coling-main.454
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ella Rabinovich, Hila Gonen, and Suzanne Stevenson. 2020. Pick a Fight or Bite your Tongue: Investigation of Gender Differences in Idiomatic Language Usage. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 5181–5192, Barcelona, Spain (Online). International Committee on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Pick a Fight or Bite your Tongue: Investigation of Gender Differences in Idiomatic Language Usage (Rabinovich et al., COLING 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.coling-main.454.pdf
Code
 ellarabi/gender-idiomatic-language