Women's language in literary discourse: The focus on modality

Various linguistic means characterizing women's language were presented to the public in the 70-s. The first systematic and critical approach to linguistic features of women's language was presented in a pioneering study by Robin Lakoff in 1975. Since then, it has been considered as a beginning of a new interdisciplinary field of "gender studies". Nowadays, women's language presents an important issue of sociolinguistic studies of language and gender. This paper analyzes the means for expressing modality in women's language found in literary discourse. The corpora are comprised of seven novels about Harry Potter in English and Serbian. According to some theoreticians of language and gender, among whom are Coates, Mills, Livia and others, frequent use of epistemic modality presents a significant trait of women's linguistic pattern. If we assume that attitudes and ideologies could be expressed by linguistic features such as modality, this paper aims to compare the modal forms and their meaning in English and Serbian by using contrastive linguistic analysis, determine the differences in linguistic patterns between the two, and attempt to explain possible ideological implications from the CDA perspective.