A COMPARATIVE CORPUS BASED ANALYSIS OF DISCOURSE MARKERS FOR GENDER DESCRIPTION IN THE ALCHEMIST AND PRIDE AND PREJUDICE

Abstract

This study is the corpus-based study of the comparison between the male and female writers specifically Paulo Coelho and Jane Austen. The specified text for this corpus-based study is ‘The Alchemist’ by Paulo Coelho and ‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen. It is believed that female uses more discourse markers than a male. It is also believed that as far as the linguistic behavior of the male is concerned, the males are characterized by less use of discourse markers in language whereas the female is concerned, the female uses more discourse markers as meaningless fillers than males. The data for corpus analysis is taken as the text in a machinereadable format that is TXT. The data for this research includes the text of two pieces of writings one by a male writer and another written by a female writer. These two novels include ‘The Alchemist’ by Paulo Coelho and ‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Jane Austen. These novels are downloaded in pdf form and then converted in the xxx.txt format that can be used as input for AntConc. The present research is done by using the software ‘Ant Conc.’ because this is appropriate software that the researcher can use it easily and have the appropriate results.