To Örebro University

oru.seÖrebro University Publications
Change search
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf
Sorry, I apologize!: The difference between men’s and women’s usage of apologies in emails
Örebro University, School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences.
Örebro University, School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences.
2022 (English)Independent thesis Basic level (degree of Bachelor), 10 credits / 15 HE creditsStudent thesis
Abstract [en]

This essay aims to discover differences and similarities in the linguistic behavior ofpoliteness in apologetic expressions between men and women in emails. Material wastaken from the Enron Corpus. This Corpus includes information about the senders andrecipients of the chosen email, the context, and an email thread. We searched for twodifferent apologetic expressions, "sorry" and "I apologize", and chose 25 of eachexpression to analyze superficially. We also compared them to each other and by thegender of the user. Out of those 25, we chose ten to analyze more in-depth, five ofwhich used "sorry" and the other five used "I apologize" as apologetic expression. Weanalyzed the emails through the lens of politeness theory, which apologetic expressionwas used, if humour occurred, and to what email genre it belonged. Our results basedon this study showed that women used the apologetic expression "I apologize" morethan men, and that men used "sorry" more frequently than women. One possibleconclusion of this is that women appeared to be more formal in their emails. They alsoindicated tendencies to be nurturing, cohesive, and cooperative in their language. On theother hand, men showed less tendencies of formal behavior and more informallanguage.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2022. , p. 51
Keywords [en]
Email, Enron Corpus, apologetic expressions, politeness, gender
National Category
Other Humanities not elsewhere specified
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:oru:diva-100250OAI: oai:DiVA.org:oru-100250DiVA, id: diva2:1684616
Subject / course
English
Supervisors
Available from: 2022-07-27 Created: 2022-07-27 Last updated: 2022-09-27Bibliographically approved

Open Access in DiVA

Sorry, I apologize!: The difference between men’s and women’s usage of apologies in emails(687 kB)419 downloads
File information
File name FULLTEXT01.pdfFile size 687 kBChecksum SHA-512
a21ad5c6eb6137a4cf3bb60a2c017e7ebd9f40ba5dfa5bf2a253f75c95d217d0e68b7a2a6059dfb1105d784c7dfe18bea37d18bbb97d8c307967ba0a6afa050e
Type fulltextMimetype application/pdf

By organisation
School of Humanities, Education and Social Sciences
Other Humanities not elsewhere specified

Search outside of DiVA

GoogleGoogle Scholar
Total: 421 downloads
The number of downloads is the sum of all downloads of full texts. It may include eg previous versions that are now no longer available

urn-nbn

Altmetric score

urn-nbn
Total: 731 hits
CiteExportLink to record
Permanent link

Direct link
Cite
Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
  • modern-language-association-8th-edition
  • vancouver
  • Other style
More styles
Language
  • de-DE
  • en-GB
  • en-US
  • fi-FI
  • nn-NO
  • nn-NB
  • sv-SE
  • Other locale
More languages
Output format
  • html
  • text
  • asciidoc
  • rtf