How gender relations can be seen through forms of address. A corpus-assisted study
a seminar by Michael Pace-Sigge (University of Eastern Finland)
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Date: 16 MAY 2023 from 11:00 to 13:00
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Event location: online only due to weather alert and risk of flooding - In presence and online event
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Type: Seminars
This talk investigates the use of terms of address in relation to a number of female and male names. As research as early as the 1990s (see, amongst others, Acker, 1990; Lakoff and Lakoff, 1990; Tannen, 1994; Wodak, 1996) 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 like professor, director, minister etc. 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 early 2000s – in particular in newsprint of the time. It also gives insight in 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 primed to connect positions of responsibility and learning with the idea of ‘maleness’.