Sorry, I apologize! : The difference between men’s and women’s usage of apologies in emails

Abstract: This essay aims to discover differences and similarities in the linguistic behavior ofpoliteness in apologetic expressions between men and women in emails. Material wastaken from the Enron Corpus. This Corpus includes information about the senders andrecipients of the chosen email, the context, and an email thread. We searched for twodifferent apologetic expressions, "sorry" and "I apologize", and chose 25 of eachexpression to analyze superficially. We also compared them to each other and by thegender of the user. Out of those 25, we chose ten to analyze more in-depth, five ofwhich used "sorry" and the other five used "I apologize" as apologetic expression. Weanalyzed the emails through the lens of politeness theory, which apologetic expressionwas used, if humour occurred, and to what email genre it belonged. Our results basedon this study showed that women used the apologetic expression "I apologize" morethan men, and that men used "sorry" more frequently than women. One possibleconclusion of this is that women appeared to be more formal in their emails. They alsoindicated tendencies to be nurturing, cohesive, and cooperative in their language. On theother hand, men showed less tendencies of formal behavior and more informallanguage.