No abstract
This article, an expanded version of an oral presentation in 1999, uses corpus methodology as a research tool to investigate how social actors are classified in the public discourse of the media, with lexis as our point of entry. Our main focus is the nature of the labels which provide categorization, especially of gender relations. Our main claim is that uses of premodification associated with the two types of newspapers in Britain and their lexical choices produce differential judgmental stances that have social effects. In the first of two complementary studies, we discuss the adjective lexicon of the tabloid press in comparison with quality newspapers, with curvy, hunky and kinky as exemplars with respect to sexualization and the construction of gender. In our second study, we discuss adjectival premodification of man, woman, girl and boy in tabloids and broadsheets: our findings show that the media categorizes people through very specific points of view and values not always apparent to a non-critical reader. Collocational patterns undoubtedly reveal societal and sociolectal attitudes, especially in terms of stereotypes of gender, sexualization, age and behaviour. Our main aim, therefore, is to show that corpus studies can help to deconstruct hidden meanings and the asymmetrical ways people are represented in the press.
This paper presents a study of English adjectives used to describe men and women of different ages, and the gender- and age-based stereotypes revealed. Drawing on evidence in the 450-million-word Bank of English corpus, it examines central items such as young and old in combination with the gendered pairing man/men and woman/women, identifying sets of adjectival collocates associated with different age groups. These adjectives can be considered secondary age-markers, coding age through reference to physical and behavioural characteristics typical of different age groups and genders, and comprising a cryptotype (Whorf 1956) or covert category. This is discussed in the final part of the paper, along with deviant usage (‘young’ adjectives applied to older people, and vice versa). Since adjectives clustering with young mainly evaluate positively, those with old are mostly negative, there are implications for studies of ageism and sexism in language, and representation, age and gender more broadly.
Age as an important identity dimension has been comparatively neglected within gender studies. Our paper concerns the semiotic representation of a role performed in the main by older women: that of ‘grandmother’, a social category particularly associated with ageing. To explore this, we draw on image banks, corpus data and other texts in order to discuss images, lexical/textual labelling and their intermodal relations. We find in our visual data that grandmothers are contextualised in two ways: sharing semiotic resources of childhood or domestic contexts, or presented as transgressive actors, located in incongruous situations or performing behaviours inappropriate for their ‘age’. Our discussion of corpus data complements the multimodal analyses, providing further examples of stereotyping: while references to individual grandmothers often evaluate positively, there is also strong evidence of generic, figurative and other usages that trivialise and derogate. Our conclusions point to processes of social devaluation: ageism and sexism are the pervasive and underlining ideologies recurrent in these representations. The broader implications are particularly relevant for the present time, as new forms of grandmothering appear.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.