Using Corpora to Analyze Gender

235 Pages·2014·3.456 MB·English

by  Paul Baker

Using Corpora

to Analyze
Gender
Also AvAilAble from bloomsbury

An Introduction to Corpus Linguistics, David Oakey
Corpus Linguistics and Linguistically Annotated Corpora,
Sandra Kuebler and Heike Zinsmeister
Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis, Paul Baker
Using Corpora

to Analyze
Gender
PAul bAKer
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First published 2014
© Paul Baker, 2014
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Acknowledgements vi
1 Introduction 1
2 Gender difference redux: Do women really say ‘lovely’

more than men? 19
3 Nope, good guess though: How do female academics

signal disagreement? 45
4 Male bias and change over time: Where are all the

spokeswomen? 73
5 Discourse prosodies and legitimation strategies: Revisiting

the Daily Mail’s representations of gay men 105
6 What are boys and girls made of? Using Sketch Engine to

analyse collocational patterns 133
7 Triangulating methods: What can personal ads on

Craigslist reveal about gender? 157
8 Conclusion 197
Notes 209
References 215
Index 225
ACKNoWleDGemeNTs

I would like to express thanks to the following:
The research presented in this paper was supported by the ESRC Centre
for Corpus Approaches to Social Science, ESRC grant reference ES/
K002155/1.
Members of the Research in Gender, Language and Sexuality group and
the Corpus Research seminar group at Lancaster University, who provided
useful feedback for earlier drafts of some of the analysis described in this
book.
Andrew Hardie, for providing me with male and female spoken data
from the British National Corpus, to a somewhat exacting format.
John Swales, Uta Romer and Matt O’Donnell for patiently answering
my questions about the MICASE corpus.
Paul Rayson, Mike Scott, Laurence Anthony and Adam Kilgarriff for
providing corpus analysis software, without whom this book could not
have been written.
I would also like to thank Jane Sunderland and Judith Baxter, for their
continuing support and good ideas over the years.
CHAPTER ONE

Introduction
How many times did you say ‘I love you’ today?

In 2012, four days before Valentine’s Day, I was contacted by a journalist
who worked for an international newspaper. He was writing an article
‘on linguistic differences between men and women’ and was primarily
interested in ‘outlining the main linguistic differences, along with sentences/
paragraphs as spoken by men/women to illustrate such differences’. He
wanted me to give him a list of some gendered differences and he cited a
study by Harrison and Shortall (2011), which had surveyed 171 college
students and found that males report falling in love earlier than women and
saying ‘I love you’ earlier.
I replied to the journalist, saying that it is difficult to create such a list as
the amount of data needed would be enormous. We would require millions
of words of spoken language data, taken from large numbers of people
from a wide range of backgrounds and locations. It would be a good idea to
sample data at various points in time to ensure that any differences we found
were stable rather than being due to something specific about a particular
period of a particular society. With regard to the paper that the journalist
had cited, I suggested that perhaps we cannot generalize too widely from
a study which used a relatively small number of participants (99 women
and 72 men) who were of similar age and current circumstances (students)
and asked to remember and then report on their own linguistic behaviour
(Harrison and Shortall also refer to some of these issues in the discussion
section of their article1). To illustrate, I sent the journalist some information
about the phrase ‘I love you’ in the British National Corpus (BNC), a large
reference corpus consisting of 100 million words of British English of which
10 million words are transcriptions of recorded conversations. For about
71 per cent of this conversational data we know whether the speaker was
2 USING CORPORA TO ANALYZE GENDER
male or female. Although the BNC can only directly tell us about language
use in British society at the point in time that the data was collected (the
early 1990s), as one of the biggest sources of naturally occurring spoken
language data, at the time of writing, it is still one of the best resources that
corpus linguists have access to.
I found that I love you only occurred 64 times in the spoken part of the
BNC, and while the female speakers in the corpus said it about three times
as much as the males, the majority picture was that most of the speakers
did not say ‘I love you’ (at least when they were being recorded). I offered,
humorously, that people should perhaps be encouraged to say the phrase
more often.
Unsurprisingly, the journalist didn’t reply. I had not produced a list of
words and phrases which would either confirm stereotypes about gendered
language use or refute them. Either way, such a finding could have
constituted ‘news’. Instead, my response could be summarized as ‘there
is not enough evidence to draw much of a conclusion’. February 14th was
approaching and my response was unlikely to cohere with any narrative
that the journalist wanted to create.
From gender difference to gendered discourses

The above anecdote is illustrative of a dissonance between academic
research in the field of Gender and Language over the last 20 years or so,
and public/media perceptions of gender and language. But this discrepancy
was not always the case. The ‘gender differences paradigm’2 was actually
an early academic approach, linked to Lakoff’s (1975) ‘male dominance’
theory of language use (the view that males used language to dominate
women). Fishman (1977) expanded on and contributed to this theory by
proposing that women engaged in what she memorably called ‘interactional
shitwork’, which among other things involved using questions and hedges
to force responses from men in order to facilitate conversation.
While Lakoff and Fishman focused more on the notion of male dominance
than gender difference per se, there was an underlying assumption that for
men to be dominant and women to be dominated, then the sexes must also
use language differently. Towards the end of the 1980s, another approach,
popularized by Tannen (1990) emphasized gender differences rather
than male dominance. This was a perspective influenced by interactional
sociolinguistics and broadly based around the view that males and females
had distinct and separate ‘genderlects’ which resulted in ‘cross-cultural
miscommunications’. Tannen argued that men viewed conversation as a
contest, whereas women used conversation to exchange confirmation and
support. On the surface, this ‘difference’ paradigm could be seen as a more
politically neutral and thus uncontroversial3 way of thinking about gender
INTRODUCTION 3
and language. In eschewing second-wave4 feminist claims of patriarchal
dominance, ‘gender difference’ does not characterize men as oppressors and
women as victims, nor does it position anybody’s language use as ‘superior’
to anybody else’s. The difference paradigm instead views males and females
as growing up in largely separate speech communities and learning different
ways of socializing and using language. Linguistic gender differences are
therefore used to ‘explain’ interpersonal conflict within (heterosexual)
couples. Such conflicts are said to be due to misunderstandings as males
and females attach different meanings to the same utterances as well as
having different needs. Some proponents of the paradigm claim that the
sexes need to be educated in order to understand each other’s language.
‘Difference’ is thus a ‘grand’ theory, simple to grasp, blame-free and offering
an explanation and solution to couples’ conflict that is widely applicable.
It is easy to see why it has become so popular, particularly in the media,
spawning numerous relationship ‘self-help’ books and newspaper articles
about amusing linguistic gender differences that seem to confirm what we
already knew or suspected about men and women.
But while the gender differences paradigm is popular in the media,
within academia, there has been a considerable amount of disagreement
over whether men and women actually do use language differently to a
significant degree, with some researchers arguing that differences do exist
(e.g. Locke 2011), and others indicating that linguistic gender difference
is a myth (e.g. Cameron 2008). Among those who argue for difference,
there are a range of views about where such differences come from –
perhaps they can be attributed to essential biological differences relating to
chemicals in the brain, different reproductive systems or body musculature
and size which can all impact on how people come to see themselves and
are viewed by others. Possibly the differences are related to the ways that
society socializes males and females differently, with different expectations
regarding appropriate language behaviour for boys and girls. In the 1990s,
taking a post-structuralist perspective, Judith Butler proposed that gender
is performative – a form of doing rather than a form of being, so rather than
people speaking a certain way because they are male or female, instead they
use language (among other aspects of behaviour) in order to perform a male
or female identity, according to current social conventions about how the
sexes should behave. Butler pointed to female impersonators, showing that
gender performances can be subverted and are therefore not intrinsically
linked to a single sex. People learn what their correct gender performance
for their sex should be by observing and copying other people around them.
Therefore Butler (1990: 31) notes, ‘The parodic repetition of “the original”.
. . reveals the original to be nothing other than a parody of the idea of the
natural and the original.’ Butler also links gender performance to sexuality,
referring to a ‘heterosexual matrix’ (ibid.: 5). She argues that ‘. . . for bodies
to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a