A Gender- Based Study of Discourse Markers in Twitter Comments

Native speakers discourse is marked by the use of a good deal of discourse markers, henceforth DMs. Their use in the spoken as well as the written forms has some connection with the concept of politeness. Besides, the different functions of DMs help to make the discourse more coherent. As such, it is hypothesized that gender differentiation has an impact on the use of DMs. Thus, this study is intended to scrutinize the effect of gender differentiation on the use of DMs in twitter comments. To accomplish this aim, the researcher targeted (21) persons; (10) males and (11) females. She follow up their tweets to see their use of DMs while commenting on twitter. One hundred twenty nine twitter comments have been collected from male and female comments.

The results reveal that female tend to use DMs more frequently than male do. Besides, the elaborative type of DMs are the most frequent in the analyzed data.