Pick a Fight or Bite your Tongue: Investigation of Gender Differences in Idiomatic Language Usage

TL;DR

This study investigates gender differences in idiomatic language usage through a large annotated corpus, revealing that idiomatic choices reflect gender-specific preferences and exhibit distinct emotional and contextual patterns between men and women.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale empirical analysis of gender-based differences in idiomatic language, highlighting nuanced distinctions in emotional expression and contextual usage.

Findings

Idiomatic choices reflect gender-specific lexical and semantic preferences.

Men's and women's idiomatic expressions express higher emotion than literal language.

Significant differences in idiomatic usage are observed along the dimension of dominance.

Abstract

A large body of research on gender-linked language has established foundations regarding cross-gender differences in lexical, emotional, and topical preferences, along with their sociological underpinnings. We compile a novel, large and diverse corpus of spontaneous linguistic productions annotated with speakers' gender, and perform a first large-scale empirical study of distinctions in the usage of \textit{figurative language} between male and female authors. Our analyses suggest that (1) idiomatic choices reflect gender-specific lexical and semantic preferences in general language, (2) men's and women's idiomatic usages express higher emotion than their literal language, with detectable, albeit more subtle, differences between male and female authors along the dimension of dominance compared to similar distinctions in their literal utterances, and (3) contextual analysis of idiomatic expressions reveals considerable differences, reflecting subtle divergences in usage environments, shaped by cross-gender communication styles and semantic biases.