Gender Differences in the Use of Boosting Devices in Spoken Language among Kurdish Speakers

Abstract

A prevalent component of metadiscourse is the way in which authors and presenters reflect themselves in their writings, remarks, and messages. As a subclass of discourse markers, boosters are used to strengthen claims and demonstrate the speaker's and writer's commitment to their claims (Hyland, 1998). With regard to the employment of boosting devices in their casual daily encounters, this study attempted to compare any potential disparities between Kurdish female and male speakers. A quantitative research paradigm was used to achieve this goal. After being manually recorded, inspected, and transcribed from observations, data were used to calculate the number of boosters. The frequency counts and percentages of booster usage were computed, and the chi-square test was employed to compare booster usage depending on gender. It can be inferred that Kurdish women were more likely to convey their ideas with a higher degree of conviction and assertiveness because the results showed a substantial difference in the use of boosters between the two genders. This data lends credence to Lacoff's (1975) assertion that women tend to use some particular linguistic elements more frequently than men, including boosters, lexical hedges, tag questions, empty adjectives, and emphatic stress.