‘Curvy, hunky, kinky’: Using corpora as tools for critical analysis

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.

Comparing the Visitor Experience at Immersive and Tabletop Exhibits

“…Defini‐tion: Visitors’ positive and negative comments regarding the exhibit experience. A coding scheme was developed using keyword analysis, a linguistics tool that identified potentially distinguishing words between the immersives and tabletops data sets, as well as words that were unique to either data set (Caldas‐Coulthard and Moon ; Sindorf ; Kucera and Francis ). Examples of positive attitudes about exhibit experiences (Exhibit Attitudes—Positive) include mentions of fun (“It was hilarious.…”

“What Do Animals Mean to You?”: Naming and Relating to Nonhuman Animals

“…There is now an extensive literature on the ways in which people who belong to particular social categories are named, and their attributes and actions denoted in positive or negative ways, and on how labeling patterns and their connotations serve to influence perceptionsof women, migrants or the disabled, for example (Gabrielatos and Baker 2008;Aaron 2010;Caldas-Coulthard and Moon 2010). Such studies build on the understanding, supported by the principle of linguistic relativity associated with Whorf (Carroll 1956), that the language resources available to speakers may condition their conceptualizations of their experience.…”

Latent Consensus in Public Debate: Media Discussion of Fathers' Rights in the UK

“…This work allows for the quantitative examination of patterns in language, using tools such as word frequency analysis and concordancing to reveal overall trends of representation that may not be apparent from the examination of individual texts. Caldas‐Coulthard and Moon () use a lexical perspective to explore the representation of women and men in UK newspapers. O'Keefe () works with a corpus of over 270,000 words transcribed from a wide variety of broadcast genres as the basis for a range of studies into the representation of social groups.…”