Where Gender and Corpora Meet

Introduction: Where Corpus Linguistics meets gender

Language is not a random constellation of words but rather a whole made of interacting structures not always discernible to the naked eye. Since the 1970s, Corpus Linguistics (Biber, 2015; Biber et al., 1998) has been engaged in unearthing patterns by looking closely into corpora, that is, “generally large (consisting of thousands or even millions of words), representative samples of a particular type of naturally occurring language, so they can therefore be used as a standard reference with which claims about language can be measured” (Baker, 2006, p. 2), through the medium of specialist software. Such constructions are explained afterwards and interpreted by linguists’ intent on identifying patterns in the vast ocean of language use. What corpus linguists perform is thus an accurate qualitative and quantitative analysis of a body of computerised collections of written or spoken text, considered to be representative samples of authentic language usage, and then provide an explanation for certain linguistic phenomena. As Wu (2023) points out, the potential intrinsic to corpora is huge, as it can help us to “uncover patterns of usage and to test our intuitions about how language is used by particular groups of users, in particular texts” (p. 154). In this regard, corpora have been employed to identify the rules governing language usage, and they have proven most useful for the compilation of dictionaries (Heid, 2009) and grammar guides (Jones & Waller, 2015), for translation purposes (Mitkov et al., 2018), and for language teaching (Römer, 2009).

As an ever-growing, ever-evolving discipline, Corpus Linguistics has revealed itself to be a precious methodology that has much to offer to researchers interested in analysing the relationship between language and gender in discourse studies (e.g., Baker, 2008a, 2013, 2014, 2016; Baker & McEnery, 2015). Language is the locus or medium where gender is fleshed out as a social construct. As Johnson (1997) claims, “language does not simply mirror gender; it helps constitute it – it is one of the means by which gender is enacted” (p. 23). In this connection, Corpus Linguistics allows researchers to approach the study of large, machine-readable language samples from multiple perspectives, including both gendered usage (e.g., how men and women differ from each other in language use) and gendered representations (e.g., how men and women are represented through language) (Baker, 2008b, 2014). The potential of applying this method lies in that it can “serve to corroborate the findings of a more impressionistic approach, to confirm – or disconfirm – hunches, and to suggest new directions for further interrogation of the texts themselves” (Thornbury, 2010, p. 282). To put it differently, a corpus-driven analysis provides researchers with “factual backbones” for the claims they have made “based on their experiences or intuitions” (Horton, 2018, p. 1) and suggests new avenues for critically interrogating texts. In fact, as noted by Fuertes-Olivera (2007), most of the recent research on language and gender largely focuses on four categories: grammatical gender, lexical gender, referential gender, and social gender. When it comes to social gender, understood as “socially imposed stereotypical gender roles and characters” (Horton, 2018, p. 2), the spectrum of research possibilities is virtually endless, ranging from how masculinity and femininity are discursively articulated (i.e., how individuals express masculine or feminine identities through language), through gender bias, gender, and age (Murphy, 2010) to how language use helps perpetuate gender asymmetries (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet, 2013). As expressed by Gustafsson Sendén et al. (2021), “because language influences how the world is perceived […], language structure and word choices can constitute a subtle mechanism that contributes to gender hierarchies in society” (p. 590). As a tool of knowledge and sense-making, language hardly ever offers a fully objective, unbiased view of reality. According to Eckert and McConnell-Ginet (2013), “language itself is a tool of oppression” (p. 38), so it is of the essence that scholars uncover the mechanisms underlying text dynamics that enforce such oppression.

This book critically explores the power and promise of Corpus Linguistics to comprehend the connection between language and gender by gathering cutting-edge studies on a wide array of discourse types, discourse being regarded as “patterns of language across texts [which present] different views of the world and different understandings” (Paltridge, 2012, p. 2) and characterised by its communicative potential and coherence (Kamalu & Osisanwo, 2015, p. 170). In particular, the topics discussed are adventure tourism (Chapter 1), the disciplinary discourse of male and female research in the field of the Humanities (Chapter 2), the construction of feminist discourse in social media (Chapter 3), forms of address in British corpora (Chapter 5), judgments from the European Court of Human Rights (Chapter 7), language education (Chapter 8), and the nature of literary discourse in women’s writing (Chapters 4 and 6). The chapters collected in this volume show not only the complex workings of corpora building and analysis but also how it is possible for researchers to explore an a priori hypothesis by resorting to the use of corpora or to approach a specific corpus letting the data drive their analysis and exegesis from the very outset. The volume will appeal to both general readers and specialist researchers interested in the interplay between Corpus Linguistics, gender, and discourse. To the editors’ best knowledge, there are studies where these three elements flow together, but there is no collection that comprises a selection of them. In the following paragraphs, we provide a brief description of the works that are gathered here.

First, Chapter 1 “Adventure tourism discourse: A corpus-based study from a gender approach” is by Isabel Durán-Muñoz, who examines the discourse used in the segment of adventure tourism by using a methodology based on the specialised corpus Advencor. Traditionally, adventure activities have gained more fame among male tourists than female tourists (e.g., Ewert, 1985; Ewert & Hollenhorst, 1989; Schuett, 1993), apparently due to the fact that participation in such activities requires some physical skills and strength, as well as involves levels of risk. The author of this chapter aims to unveil whether this gender difference in practitioners also affects the language used in this sector. With this objective in mind, three types of analysis are performed: (1) a quantitative study of personal and possessive pronouns, (2) a qualitative analysis of both of them, and (3) the observation of keywords designating practitioners in a range of adventure activities. The findings show that gender-marked language is not common in this specialised discourse, since the very few examples detected do not appear to be gender biased. Nevertheless, the professions associated with adventure tourism seem to have normally belonged to men, as corpus data reveals in the presence of man-related pronouns.

After that, Eva Lucía Jiménez-Navarro is the author of Chapter 2 “A corpus-assisted approach to gender in the Humanities discourse”, which follows a methodology based on an ad hoc English corpus to explore the use of language in the Spanish Humanities. More specifically, she aims to analyse any characteristics of linguistic discrimination after hypothesising that the language employed by academic scholars should be devoid of any marks of gender. After compiling the Humancor corpus, the software Sketch Engine is trusted to carry out the exploration. Four subcorpora result from this corpus compilation in terms of two variables, the gender of the texts’ authors (female or male) and the field of research (Linguistics or Literature), which are used to answer the four research questions addressed in this work. The main findings suggest that those terms referring to the male gender are more commonly used by male writers, but it may be a matter of sheer coincidence. Additionally, those phrases which combine a female and a male referent are rather scarce. Regarding the phraseological study performed, it is emphasised that both woman and man tend to co-occur with verbs carrying negative connotations. Overall, the author highlights that these issues might result from the very contents of the texts rather than being a clear example of linguistic discrimination.

Then, Beatriz Martín-Gascón, in Chapter 3 “The voices of Twitter: The continuous construction of feminist and antifeminist discourse”, relies on a cognitive linguistics approach and social media data to delve into gender discourse. She explores over 13,000 tweets containing the Spanish terms feminista and feminazi in order to unveil the features of the Idealised Cognitive Model (Lakoff, 1987) evoked by each of them. The underlying motivation of this analysis is a pilot study that examines contexts of the two terms retrieved from Instagram and from a Spanish corpus available in the Sketch Engine software. In this pilot study, feminista used to occur with positive terms (e.g., igualdad, derechos, mujeres, rosa), whereas feminazi used to appear together with terms carrying negative connotations (e.g., prejuicio, insulto, muerte, rencor). As for the main study, findings show that tweets using the term feminista are prone to break with the prototypical role of women seen as human beings who must stay at home and just take care of their family. On the other hand, women are dehumanised in gender discourse in such a way that the metaphor Women are animals is behind the use of the term feminazi. As a conclusion, feminist discourse seems to clash with messages containing irony and hatred.