Item Detail
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27168
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0
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0
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English
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Gender Differences in General Conference
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Provo, UT
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Brigham Young University
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17
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Honors thesis--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Linguistics, 2009.
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This thesis uses the Gender-as-culture hypothesis (GAC in the context of General Conference talks of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). The GAC hypothesis is a sociolinguistic hypothesis that explains male/female speech differences and miscommunications as two different cultures. A brief overview of the history of gender difference research is given, as well as a brief overview of corpus linguistics, the medium of the study. Anton Mulac's research has applied the GAC hypothesis to Gudykunst and Ting-Toomey's four dimensions of intercultural style (direct vs. indirect, succinct vs. elaborate, personal vs. contextual, and instrumental vs. affective). Mulac's study showed that sex-preferential features correlate to these dimensions of intercultural style, and therefore the speech of each gender can be viewed as a part of a culture. In this study I correlate specific male and female preferential speech patterns to those four dimensions of intercultural style for each gender's culture. The goal of this thesis is to see if the GAC hypothesis, as applied by Anton Mulac, also applies in the context of LDS General Conference through corpus linguistics. If the hypothesis is proved correct in this context, it shows the importance of the same-gender meetings currently conducted in the church for the best possible communication.