From gorgeous to grumpy

Abstract

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.

Gendered representations through speech: The case of theHarry Potterseries

“…Romaine demonstrated, for example, that the word spinster (‘unmarried woman’) has particularly negative connotations because it often appears with adjectives such as lonely and prim . Similar patterns have been found in the Bank of English corpus, in which adjectives often contained descriptors of age and gender entwined in their meaning (Caldas-Coulthard and Moon, 2010, 2016; Moon, 2014).…”

“…kings and queens versus queens and kings ) is robust, even when controlling for factors such as syllable structure and frequency. Women and men also tend to be represented inequitably based on words used to describe them, in terms of age (Moon, 2014), appearance (Caldas-Coulthard and Moon, 2010), and trends of labeling (Baker, 2010; Page, 2003; Pearce, 2008). Caldas-Coulthard (1995) found a large discrepancy in the extent to which women’s and men’s voices were reported in newspapers (the Guardian , the Independent , and The Times ).…”

Adjectival Attributes with the Nouns “čovek”, “žena”, “muškarac” and “muž”

“…Using the entire Bank of English corpus, Moon has conducted research into gender and age stereotypes and prejudices by analysing adjectival premodification of noun phrases headed by the nouns man/men and woman/women modified by adjectival attributes that clearly denote age, such as young and old. Her results show that young men and women are mostly described by adjectives with positive connotations, while adjectives used to describe older men and women often have negative connotations (Moon, 2014).…”

Democratization and Gender-neutrality in English(es)

“…This “turn” entails not only the use of increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques in quantitative research, but also the expectation that even primarily qualitatively oriented studies will contain some degree of quantification of the phenomenon in question (see also Janda 2013). As a result, recent years have seen an increasing number of data-driven studies on language, gender, and sexuality, mainly focusing on aspects of the representation and construction of identities (e.g., Caldas-Coulthard & Moon 2010; Moon 2014; Baker & Levon 2015a, 2015b; Potts 2015; Norberg 2016; Taylor 2016); Konnelly (this issue), on the varying patterns of representation of men and women in US broadcast talk, contributes to this growing body of research. The advantage of large corpora in such studies lies in affording researchers the ability to uncover latent patterns of representation and to avoid “cherry-picking” only those results that fit their expectations, although, as noted by Baker (2014), corpus linguistic studies always involve an element of subjectivity, and therefore researcher reflexivity and the use of triangulation remain extremely important.…”