Geography and involvement: a linguistic analysis of women’s discourse

Abstract

[Abstract] This research project aims at assessing the level of involvement in speeches by women representative of different countries and institutions, either governments or organisations. Different variables will be taken into account to carry out the analysis, the geographical origin of speakers being the main one. The principal taxonomy here will be the division between developed and developing countries since this factor may have some influence on the way women use language for their vindications. Also, the kind of institution they represent, government, inter-governmental organisation or nongovernmental organisation, will be taken into consideration. Data will be obtained from a corpus comprising a group of texts written and spoken by women in a specific scenario: the Fourth World Conference on Women Action for Equality, Development and Peace organised in Beijing (China) in September 1995. Since some authors have already identified the linguistic features that are used for the expression of involvement, we will analyse the corpus by using five of the features, included in Biber’s Dimension 1, that determine how involved authors are regarding what they want to transmit.