Addressing as a gender-preferential way for suggestive selling in Chinese e-commerce live streaming discourse: A corpus-based approach.

This paper explores sellers' addressing behaviours in Chinese e-commerce live streaming discourse by focusing on the impact of gender. Data were drawn from a self-built corpus comprising 120 h of transcribed texts from live streaming on Taobao. By conducting a corpus-based analysis, we compared males' and females' keywords for addressing customers and their performative functions of suggestive selling. The findings show that: (1) both males and females use a small percentage of kinship terms; (2) males' ratio of address pronouns to nouns greatly surpasses females', but their frequency of ' nín ' (deferential you) is much lower than females'; (3) females are more likely to consistently use nouns with the meaning of baby, whereas males prefer utilising diverse friendship terms; and (4) females frequently use a pattern of 'thank/greet + baby' to conduct ritual interactions more often than males. We argue that both males' and females' addressing behaviours function to promote successful selling; however, gender distinctions do exist in terms of their lexical choices and pragmatic uses of addressing words. The current study contributes to both pragmatics and the sociolinguistic study of gender and language. • Provides research data on Chinese addressing behaviors in e-commerce live streaming context. • Explores how sellers manage rapport via address pronouns and nouns for suggestive selling. • Focuses on gender's impact on addressing forms by conducting a corpus-based analysis. • Finds both similarities and differences in males' and females' use of addressing forms. • Contributes to both pragmatics and the sociolinguistic study of gender and language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]