Men's vs Women's Words on Facebook: The Differences on the Use of Adjectives and Degree of Informality

摘要

The present study concerns the differences between woman's language and man's language when women and men post or give their comments in such a social media like Facebook particularly in their adjectives. The study aims to identify the adjectives used by women and men in their Facebook and figure out the degree of informality in their comments or walls. The data were collected from the writer's Facebook. A week observation on the Facebook wall along with its comments posted by the first 10 men and women was conducted. The adjectives were analyzed from the Biber's perspective (1999) and the degree of informality was analyzed based on what has been proposed by Chang and Swales (1999). The findings show that man's and woman's language in social media have different patterns from the common differences between men's and women's language.