“To be different from or to be different than in Present-day American English: A Study of Style and Gender Differences Using the Corpus of Spoken Professional American-English”

This paper explores the occurrences of different from and different than in the Corpus of Spoken Professional American English (CSPAE) and shows that different than is much more widely used in formal spoken American English than hitherto considered. The frequencies, however, differ depending on the setting and the gender of the speakers. Women tend to be careful enough to avoid the use of than in very formal settings, whereas the gender difference is increasingly smaller as the setting becomes less formal. In the White House press conferences there is a wide gap between men and women in the use of than, while both men and women employ it fairly freely in meetings where participants freely and interactively exchange opinions on practical issues.

Related publication(s)

• Iyeiri, Yoko, Michiko Yaguchi, & Hiroko Okabe. 2005. “Gender and Style: The Discourse Particle like in the Corpus of Spoken Professional American English”. English Corpus Studies 12: 37-51.
• Iyeiri, Yoko, Michiko Yaguchi, and Yasumasa Baba. 2013. “Try to do and try and do Again: Verb Complementation in Spoken American English”. Kyoto Working Papers in English and General Linguistics 2: Special Issue in Honour of Professor Keinsei Sugayama on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday,ed. Michiko Yaguchi, Hiroyuki Takagi, Kairi Igarashi, Tsutomu Watanabe, Takafumi Maekawa, and Taiki Yoshimura, pp. 265-79, Tokyo: Kaitakusha.