Gendered Distinctions of Interjection Usage in the YouTube Context

Linguistic gender research has originated from Western academia and gone through centennial and continual development throughout the birth and growth of linguistics. Lately, the interjection words, serving as an observable but marginal lexical index, have played an increasingly significant role in many aspects of linguistic studies for recent decades, for example, in the way the experts analyze the vocal expression of emotion, study the cross-lingual analysis in Japanese and English, and many other applications. This paper adopts three classifications of interjection words noise-like primary interjections, word-like primary interjections, and secondary interjections to further explore the relationship between gender and each classification of interjections on the platform of YouTube. The randomly chosen videos of YouTubers, fifty male YouTubers, and fifty female ones, are transcribed into words and analyzed systematically with the assistance of the structured questionnaire and the corpus analysis. Consequently and generally, male YouTubers using the interjections are significantly different from those female YouTubers on word frequency (p<0.05) which agreed with the data from noise-like primary interjections and secondary interjections but disagreed with word-like primary interjections. It suggests that gender does influence the common usage of the interjections significantly, but there are still some exceptions, like the word-like primary interjections.