Pick a Fight or Bite your Tongue: Investigation of Gender Differences in Idiomatic Language Usage (2020)

Abstract: A large body of research on gender-linked language has established foundations regarding cross-gender differences in lexical, emotional, and topical preferences, along with their sociological underpinnings. We compile a novel, large and diverse corpus of spontaneous linguistic productions annotated with speakers’ gender, and perform a first large-scale empirical study of distinctions in the usage of figurative language between male and female authors. Our analyses suggest that (1) idiomatic choices reflect gender-specific lexical and semantic preferences in general language, (2) men’s and women’s idiomatic usages express higher emotion than their literal language, with detectable, albeit more subtle, differences between male and female authors along the dimension of dominance compared to similar distinctions in their literal utterances, and (3) contextual analysis of idiomatic expressions reveals considerable differences, reflecting subtle divergences in usage environments, shaped by cross-gender communication styles and semantic biases.

## introduction distinctions in language usage between men and women open a window into the differences in their perception of the world around them. over the years, these differences have been studied extensively, both in empirical linguistics @xcite @xcite , and using datadriven computational approaches (e.g., @xcite , @xcite , @xcite ). striking cross-gender deviations in lexical and syntactic properties have been identified, igniting debate as to their underlying psycholinguistic and sociological interpretations @xcite @xcite . in contrast to the study of literal linguistic utterances, only sparse prior research exists on gender differences in figurative language (for review see @xcite ). figurative language is a common communicative device in which utterances use words in ways that deviate from their literal interpretation (e.g., @xcite ), including a range of devices, such as irony, sarcasm, personification, and idiomatic expressions. various communicative motivations for nonliteral language have been proposed, such as distinguishing different intensities of the same emotion, and communicating ideas and subjective experiences more vividly (for a review, see @xcite ). indeed, figurative language has been suggested to reflect the way that concepts are structured within human thought (e.g., @xcite ). consequently, differences in the way men and women perceive experiences and emotions give rise to a plausible hypothesis that male (m) and female (f) authors differ in their preferences in the choice of non-literal language; however, there has been no large-scale computational study conducted on the distinctions in such usage patterns. this gap in the research stems in part from the sparsity of large-scale corpora of linguistic productions employing figurative language, annotated for the gender of a speaker. the increasing popularity of online discussion platforms offers an unprecedented opportunity to address this gap, by harvesting information from texts authored by hundreds of thousands of authors. in this study we introduce genderreddit -a large and diverse corpus of linguistic productions of men and women collected from the reddit 1 platform; each author in genderreddit is annotated with their (self-reported) binary gender. 2 with over 100m posts and 3.4b words by nearly 30k distinct authors, this dataset introduces a unique opportunity to study the language of men and women at scale. here, we specifically investigate the use of figurative expressions in this new dataset, thereby bridging the gap in empirical research in this field. we suggest and empirically quantify factors that drive gender-related preferences in non-literal language, focusing on one of the most pervasive types of figurative utterances: idiomatic expressions. idioms are phrases, such as 'on cloud nine', 'pick a fight', or 'eat someone alive', whose meaning is not (entirely) deducible from that of the literal words that comprise them. aiming at identifying similarities and differences in male and female idiomatic language, we focus on three research questions: q1: do gender-specific lexical preferences affect our choices of idiomatic expressions, considering both the surface (explicit) form and the underlying meaning of an idiom? ## background and related work a large body of work exists on identifying and interpreting differences in the language of men and women, focusing on both topical and stylistic distinctions between the two genders @xcite @xcite . the connection between gender and language has also been studied in the field of sociolinguistics @xcite @xcite , suggesting (not uncontroversially) that men tend to use linguistic forms and a communicative style reflecting higher tendency to dominance, engagement, and control, while women are more likely to employ positive emotions. @xcite studied cross-gender participation in various topical threads on reddit, observing significantly higher engagement of male authors in gaming, technology, and sports, while higher female participation was found in subreddits on personal and domestic advice. gender-linked distinctions in topical and lexical preferences were also highlighted by @xcite , who demonstrated significant correlation of the presence of certain liwc categories in a text and its author's gender), as well as by @xcite , who reported up to 80% accuracy on a binary gender classification task using ngrams of words. recently, the computational investigation of male and female language has been prolific, yielding an empirical foundation for the theoretically-motivated hypotheses on characteristics of the two linguistic varieties. automatic classification of an author's gender has shed much light on the manifestation of gender-specific traits in language, including differences in the usage of pronouns, numerals, emotion markers, and intensifiers (e.g., 'definitely', 'absolutely') @xcite @xcite . @xcite addressed the task of gender identification as a word-sense disambiguation scenario, and demonstrated that an author's gender can be accurately detected from the contextual environments of a few hundred common words in the language. marked gender differences on emotional dimensions were shown by @xcite , who found that women tend to use words from the joy-sadness axis, whereas men prefer terms from the feartrust axis. @xcite found gender differences in perception of emotion, reporting that women rate the degree of emotion in speech fragments higher than men. studies on gender-related differences in figurative language are relatively sparse (occasionally conducted in a laboratory experimental setting), with no large-scale computational investigation on the differences between m and f authors. research has shown that men use more sarcasm and irony than women in spoken communication @xcite , even when the risk of misinterpretation is equally estimated by men and women @xcite . @xcite found gender differences in preferences in non-literal language emotional communication, reporting that men used more figurative language in description of negative (vs. positive) emotions, while no significant difference was found in female language. our work is the first large-scale computational study on gender differences in figurative language, focusing on idioms as a pervasive communicative device. ## differences across genders in figurative language usage patterns in each subsection below, we define and apply quantitative and qualitative analyses that address each of the three research questions, q1-q3, finding considerable differences between the two genders. before turning to our specific research questions, we first verify that the overall usage patterns of idioms differ between our male and female subcorpora. briefly, we calculate two probability distributions for m and f usage over the list of 527 idiomatic expressions, and compare them using jensen-shannon divergence (jsd), obtaining a value of 0.140. we find that this value differs significantly (@xmath0.0e-6) from the average jsd of 500 random splits within m usages (mean @xmath1.038) or f usages (mean @xmath2.035). thus there are indeed significant cross-gender distinctions in the usage of idiomatic expressions, compared to variation in random samples within the same gender. ## conclusions we compile a novel dataset of linguistic productions annotated with speakers' gender, and use it to conduct the first large-scale empirical study of cross-gender differences in preferences of idiomatic expressions -along lexical, emotional, and contextual dimensions. the released dataset is likely to facilitate future exploratory activities in this field. our future plans include further investigation of the distinctions in male vs. female productions, focusing on additional types of figurative language (e.g., irony, sarcasm and personification), a different genre (e.g., literature), or modality (e.g., spoken language). additionally, our work focuses only on english. conducting similar research with languages other than english, and comparing the findings, would be another interesting direction.