Gender Variation in Mix-Gender Conversations in the Semi-institutional Discourse: The Case of Talk Show

In this paper, gender-related variations in the semi-institutional discourse are examined. We investigate the cross-gender conversation in the talk show Behind the Headline with Wentao, a corpus of around 88,000 words of Mandarin Chinese conversation and identify gender variation between female and male guests. We explore the turn-taking features and characteristic terms that set the gender categories apart. We observe that female speakers tend to produce more and longer turns when discussion topics about people and relationships whereas males have longer turns when discussing leisure activities and issues. Generational differences across binary gender groups show that females use more hedges of various functions than males. The results also suggest that male and female speakers tend to use more gendered terms when the conversational topics involved people and relationships.