Language and "the"

I love Language Log as a place to peep in on the ebbs and flows of research and interests among professionals in the field of language and linguistics. Growing up internationally I have been exposed to many languages and acquired the rudiments of a few but I have never been particularly fluent nor learned in a very specialized field.

But there is so much that is interesting over in those meadows.

For instance, there is this post Why definiteness is decreasing, part 2 by Mark Liberman. Here is Part 1. In Part 1 Liberman is observing and commenting on the significance of the decline in the use of the definitive the. That's interesting in its own right. But in Part 2, Liberman points out something that I find fascinating.

In this post, I want to discuss two other socio-stylistic dimensions — age and sex. If the language is changing, then we expect to see "age grading", where younger people tend to exhibit the innovative pattern, while older people's usage is more old-fashioned. And because women are generally the leaders in language change, we expect to see women at every age being more linguistically innovative and men being more conservative. In other words, "young men talk like old women". And as the plot on the right illustrates, differences by age and sex in the frequency of the seem to confirm this hypothesis.

(Click on the graph for a larger version.)

These numbers come from the Fisher corpus of conversational telephone speech, comprising nearly 12,000 10-minute conversations involving a similar number of callers. Here are the numbers in tabular form — frequency of the, as a percentage of all words produced by callers in the specified age range:

AGE <28 Age 28-40 Age >40
MALE 2.53% 2.72% 2.97%
FEMALE 2.31% 2.49% 2.62%

And trust me, the numbers are large enough that these differences are statistically significant.

What is the explanation for why males use the definitive the more than females? I have no idea and it is not addressed in that particular post. But a ~10% disproportion is an intriguing fact.