Sailors and Tentative Talk-a-lots. - A study of folk linguistic notions of gendered language in action films

Abstract: The relationship between reality and the media is a complex one; some say that media is the most important symbolic world for the shaping of our perception of reality while others argue that expecting the media to be representative of the real world may be potentially harmful for our understanding of this relationship. This study investigates this relationship by measuring the frequency of three folk linguistic notions of gendered language in action films. The selected notions are 'Women talk more than men', 'Men swear more than women' and 'Women use more tag and intonation questions than men'. These notions are studied in order to aid the understanding of the image of men and women projected by the action genre. The method used to achieve this aim is the quantitative method Content Analysis. The material consists of 10 action films from 2002-2006. 4 of these action films feature a sole male protagonist, another 4 feature a sole female protagonist, and the last 2 feature both a male and a female character as co-protagonists. All in all, 1105 minutes of film are analyzed. The study shows that male protagonists produce the highest number of each studied variable (lines, swear words as well as tag and intonation questions) providing grounds for the existence of one of the three studied folk linguistic notions. However, considering that the study also indicates that male protagonists speak more than their female counterparts, the higher production of all studied variables may be a result of this.