Deborah, Linguist yet Professor Michael. How British corpora reflect gender relations through forms of address

1

Pace-Sigge, Michael T L

Where Gender and Corpora Meet: New Insights into Discourse Analysis

Jiménez-Navarro, Eva Lucía; Martínez Serrano, Leonor María

978-3-631-88035-7

978-3-631-88679-3

978-3-631-88680-9

Peter Lang

5794

1

Yes

2024

2024

109-133

English

No

No

6121 Languages

Abstract: This chapter investigates the use of terms of address in relation to the use of female and male first names. As research as early as the 1990s (cf. Acker, 1990; Lakoff & Lakoff, 1990; Tannen, 1994; Wodak, 1996, amongst others) has shown, there is a clear link in the discourse between work roles and gender. This corpus- assisted research will use both the BNC 1994 and BNC 2014 to provide a basis for a qualitative and diachronic look at the uses of such terms as professor, director, minister, and so on. The use of these corpora provides an empirical snapshot of the choice of address employed in Britain in the 1980s/1990s and then in the 2010s. The original BNC provides some information about how forms of address appeared in spoken conversation; the majority of the references discussed here are found in newsprint. While statistics show the ratios of females versus males in positions of power, this fine- grained research shows how progress has been made, yet how this is an uneven development. It also gives new insight into the concrete nesting (cf. Hoey, 2005) of female names as compared to male names in mainstream discourse; this enables the construction of how the readership is psychologically subtly primed to connect positions of influence and learning with the idea of ‘maleness’. Keywords: BNC, diachronic change, expectations, lexical priming, naming conventions