Cathrine Norberg

Naughty Boys and Sexy Girls The Representation of Young Individuals in a Web-Based Corpus of English

Although stereotypical gender patterns have been reported in a number of studies over the last forty years or so, and attempts to address gender-biased representation have been made, males and females are still represented differently in modern English-speaking societies. Further research uncovering gender-marked language and biased gender structures is therefore needed. The study presented here is a contribution to the still small, but nevertheless growing number of studies employing corpora to study the discourse of gender. The focus of the study is the representation of young individuals in a previously unexplored one-hundred-million-word web corpus of English, the New Model Corpus (NMC). Following earlier work on collocation and gender, the aim of this paper is to explore what verbs collocate with the lemmas girl and boy as subject and object and what words modify them in a worldwide corpus of English. The purpose is to reveal how these two lemmas pattern with other words, and in doing so point at cultural and social meanings embodied in the representation of girls and boys.

Gender diversity and innovation in mining – a corpus-based discourse analysis

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to gain increased knowledge about gender diversity and innovation in mining by analyzing how women are discursively represented in relation to these two concepts ...

Lady Audley's Secret, Gender and the Representation of Emotions

The relationship between gender, emotion and normative ideals is a prominent theme in British sensation fiction of the 1860s, and a central concern in Mary Elizabeth Braddons novel Lady Audleys Secret (1862). But despite critical assent concerning the importance of emotions in the text, there are no focused studies of their meaning and narrative function. This study explores how representations of anger and shame convey gender specificity, and how the way characters express and perform emotions interplays with constructions of social power in the novel. Braddons work contains more examples of women than men exhibiting signs of anger and more instances of men than women showing shame, which means that anger might be understood as a female and shame as a male quality in the text. The contexts where these emotions occur indicate the opposite, however. Women displaying anger are shown to transgress gendered conduct codes, whereas men mostly experience shame because of womens misbehaviour and as their guardians. Although the distribution of instances when male and female characters show anger or shame could initially be understood as a manifestation of the disruptive qualities of the sensation genre, such an interpretation is undermined by the gendered relations between emotional expression, power and control in the novel.