She Talks, He Talks: Gender, Indirectness, and Length

Abstract

This paper aimed at exploring whether men and women were different with regard to the use of indirectness and length in Persian. Moreover, it investigated to extract the range of directness and indirectness strategies used by males and females in particular situations. To achieve the aforesaid goals, the data were grouped by means of the use of written discourse completion tasks (DCT), with fifteen situational settings. The results indicated statistically significant differences between the groups on using length. The findings of this research verified gender-bound language at least in fifteen areas and the corpus investigated in this study. Besides, the findings of this paper showed that women use an indirect communication pattern. Women also prefer using sentence length.