A Corpus based Study on Gender Differences in Language-Take Friends as the Example

Men and women are different from each other in many aspects, including in language. In order to analyze the differences of male and female people's language in vocabulary and styles, two corpora have been built: one is the female main characters' lines of some episodes of Friends; and the other is the male main characters'. Taking Brown corpus as the reference corpus, a list of keywords for the two corpora, as well as frequencies of words, have been worked out respectively, by applying AntConc. Concordances and contexts also have been analyzed. The findings show that women use more interjection and hedges than men. What's more, women tend to be more cooperative than men in conversations. Additionally, women's words are less decisive when com-pared to men's. The results of this paper could give some suggestions in cross gender conversation so as to gain more effective communication.