Complimenting and involvement in peer reviews: Gender variation

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Abstract
This article presents an analysis of gender differences in the use of compliments in one genre of written discourse. The data base is a set of 47 peer reviews of academic papers written by graduate students in the form of letters. Drawing on work from several theoretical perspectives, we analyzed the forms, strategies, and discourse functions of compliments in these papers. We found that women made significantly greater use of compliment intensifiers and personal referencing than did men. In using compliments to structure discourse, women more often framed the text with both opening and closing compliments. Consistent patterns suggested that women writers accommodated to the gender of their addressee more than did men, resulting in a discernible female-female complimenting style. The study illustrates specific ways that gender is involved in being polite and in creating and sustaining a sense of involvement in written discourse. (Complimenting, politeness, sociolinguistics, gender, discourse strategies, cross-sex communication, English)

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