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Middle-aged male syntax

It seems to me that investigations into gender differences in language and language use have concentrated, in a majority of cases, on female Speakers, 'women's language', how women's Situation in society is reflected in the linguistic System of particular languages, and so forth. It is also the case, it seems to me, that empirical studies in this area have mostly been concerned with phonetics and the lexicon, and to a much lesser degree with morphology or syntax. In this paper, I want to focus my attention on some aspects of the Speech of members of a social group that can be regarded äs the complete opposite of any female group, namely middleand upper-class, middleaged males from the capital Oslo, and I will concentrate on the syntax of this group. (For other studies on syntax and gender, see Wiggen 1976; Togeby 1985; Preisler 1986.) My question is: are there salient syntactic features in the speech of this particular group that distinguish it from other social groups, and, if there are, can we explain why such special traits exist? I think it best, however, to Start with some words of caution. In general, we should not exaggerate gender differences in language use. After all, these differences are relatively small, and they should always be seen in connection with other variables, such äs social group/class and age. I also want to emphasize that the empirical data presented in this paper represent only a small proportion of statistics from the sociolinguistic results of an almost 20-year-old project. These data, however, show interesting tendencies that I would like to present and speculate about. What I want to do, then, is to report on some syntactic features that showed up in the Performance of six male informants in the Oslo project in the 1970s. These features are especially interesting, I find, against the background of the repeated claim that female Speakers in western, urbanized societies tend to follow a prestigious or official norm of language use more than male Speakers do.