Rezaei, Nazila

The Use of English Intensifiers across Genders in Political Tweets

Using intensifiers is a significant linguistic strategy through which individuals can manipulate the degree an‎d the force of their utterances. How men an‎d women use this specific language elements differ from one another (Holmes, 1995; Ito & Tagliamonte, 2003; Lakoff, 1975). Focusing on the use of these linguistics resources by male an‎d female politicians, this study seeks to investigate how gender differences influence the use of intensifiers in the tweets posted on X (formerly Twitter) platform. Additionally, the study explores the most frequently used category of intensifiers, iteration, an‎d co-occurrence forms of intensifiers. To this end, 36,478 tweets (1,309,852 words) of 50 native Englishspeaking politicians were manually collected over a one-year period. The data were first analyzed using AntConc to generate frequency lists an‎d concordance lines for the intensifiers identified in the corpus. The results were then organized an‎d coded in Microsoft Excel for further quantitative analysis. Finally, the data were imported into SPSS, where a Chi-square test was conducted to examine the relationship between gender an‎d intensifier use. Drawing on the classifications of Quirk er al. (1985) an‎d Van Mulken an‎d Schellens (as cited in Mombarg, 2023), 4757 tokens of intensifiers were found in the dataset. Omissible intensifiers were found to be the most frequently used category of intensifiers. The results also revealed the significant gender-based difference in the use of intensifiers, with male politicians showing a higher tendency to use them. Male politicians tended to use intensifiers so, almost, an‎d entirely more than their female counterparts whereas female politicians used extremely, completely, an‎d nearly more These findings demonstrate that gender influences not only the frequency but also the communicative functions of intensifiers in political language.