jrds (print) issn 2052-417x jrds (online) issn 2052-4188 Article Gender differences in the personal pronouns usage on the corpus of congressional speeches Dragana Bozic Lenard Abstract Gender differences in language have been extensively investigated by sociolinguists since the 1960s. This paper aimed to study gender differences in the personal pro- nouns usage on the corpus of the 113th United States Congress. All uninterrupted speeches (672 by women and 3,655 by men) whose transcripts were downloaded from the official repository Thomas were analyzed with the text analysis software Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count calculating the degree to which the politicians use personal pronouns. In addition, the computational analysis results were further analyzed with the software for statistical analysis SPSS. The quantitative analysis results pointed to minor statistically significant gender differences in the personal pronouns usage. However, the qualitative analysis showed more subtle gender differ- ences pointing to linguistic changes in stereotypization. Keywords: congressional speeches; gender differences; LIWC; SPSS; personal pronouns 1. Introduction Language is one of the most important means of humans’ expression of thoughts. Guided by thoughts, choices people make in the forms of expres- sion can be paralleled to their perception of things from the real world and consequently the way they express themselves about those things. Hence, two people may be speaking about the same thing with their descriptions being Affiliation University of Osijek, Osijek, Croatia. email:
[email protected] jrds vol 3.2 2016 161–188 https://doi.org/10.1558/jrds.30111 ©2017, equinox publishing 162 Gender differences in personal pronouns usage utterly unrelated.