Male and female style of writing in memoir TEXTS
The article describes the research results of gender-sensitive memoir texts based on the memoirs of old residents in the city of Barnaul. The novelty of the study, firstly, consists in combining the formal and content approaches in our research; secondly, it is the material which the study is based on (products of authentic speech activity as opposed to artificial experimental texts). The relevance of the study is the demand-driven research in Applied Linguistics (to determine the gender of the author of a text) and the need to examine texts from a horizontal gender perspective (the average age of the informants’ maturity falls on the 50s and 70s of the 20th century). The texts are studied in the following aspects: their features, volume, syntax, vocabulary preferences, preferred forms of word-formation, structural organization, etc. These formal features complement and extend the existing list of characteristics of male and female writing, important for an examination of authorship. In particular, the difference in the verbalization of memories: the linear sequence of events in male texts and non-linear texts with numerous retrospective and prospective elements in female ones. This study has not confirmed the thesis of a larger average volume of female texts in comparison with male ones (a probable reason is the impossibility to establish the parameters of a gender personality type). It has revealed such features as ambivalence of female texts and downrightness of male texts (manifested in the frequent use of the words like "probably," "maybe," "some," "ever" and the like); a tendency to word for word representation of their own and other people's speech in male texts; stylistic neutrality of female texts and the pursuit of non-neutral, artistic design in male ones; a tendency of men to use contracted forms in their texts; the predominance of colloquial vocabulary in female texts and the active use of suffixes of subjective evaluation in female texts.