A Pragma-Gender Study of Select Couples’ Emotive Language

Variationists and gender critics have attempted to prove that language use of male and female differs across cultures. Nevertheless, studies on the cultural variance between the emotive languages of both genders are lean, reason being that, from a distance, language seems to have nothing to do with emotion. Therefore, this chapter with the view to establishing the extent to which emotive language of Nigerian couples is gendered, investigated the pragmatics select married elite Nigerian's emotive expressions of anger, love and coitus invitation. This study adopted mixed methods. A structured questionnaire titled ‘Couple’s Emotive Language’. One hundred (100) respondents: fifty educated married women and fifty men, who were staff members of a private tertiary institution in Nigeria, responded to the questionnaire on the types of speech acts language that they employ in expressing their emotions. The questionnaire contained ten questions on the respective emotional issues raised. Searle’s Speech act framework was adopted, and the SPSS statistical 17.0 was used in computing the simple percentage. The findings revealed that inasmuch as the married men and women studied in this chapter had speech acts expectations for specific emotional need, each of them still confined their speech acts within the marital sociocultural linguistic affordances of their culture/gender. Hence, the study concludes that the emotive language of married elites studied in this research is gendered.