Female and male usage of pragmatic expressions in same-sex and mixed-sex interaction

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Abstract
The present study focuses on the use of the three pragmatic expressions (you know, you see, and I mean) by female and male British English speakers. The aim of the study is two-fold: first, to establish actual differences in usage between men and women over a number of functions of the three pragmatic expressions; second, to find out whether such differences could be correlated to same-sex as opposed to mixed-sex interaction. The results of my investigation show that there are gender-specific differences in the use of pragmatic expressions. Some of the more salient differences were that the women tended to use pragmatic expressions between complete propositions to connect consecutive arguments, whereas the men preferred to use them either as attention-drawing devices or to signal repair work. The two groups also showed differences from the point of view of absolute frequencies, so that, generally speaking, the men used the expressions about 25% more often than the women and in some contexts up to twice as much. The results also point to the use of pragmatic expressions being largely dependent on whether the conversation takes place in a same-sex or in a mixed-sex environment, so that they tend to be used more sparingly in mixed-sex as compared to same-sex interaction.

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