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UCREL Corpus Research Seminar: Paul Baker

Date: 25 October 2012 Time: 02.00-03:00 pm

Venue: George Fox LT3

UCREL Corpus Research Seminar Series

Mars and Venus Re-appraised: Using the Manhattan Distance to explore the sex differences paradigm in the BNC

Paul Baker (Lancaster University)

The idea that men and women speak different "genderlects" is frequently circulated via news media and relationship advice books like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. However, since the 1990s, research in the field of Gender and Language has tended to be critical of this view, e.g. Deborah Cameron's 2008 book The Myth of Mars and Venus. Corpus research has tended to focus on sex differences, and numerous studies have used the BNC to support this viewpoint.

In this talk, I also use the BNC but employ a number of different techniques, arguing that many of the tools that corpus linguists use put researchers in a "difference mindset" from the outset. I use a measure called the Manhattan Distance to measure lexical similarity between male and female speech, as well as exploring context in order to account for differences found. Additionally, I examine some of the keywords which indicate the largest lexical differences between male and female speech. Looking at dispersion, I argue that some keywords are mainly used by small numbers of speakers and therefore indicate gender archetypes rather than being typical per se. Finally, I use a third reference corpus to examine the extent that keywords are shared between male and female speech in the BNC.

Event website: http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/crs

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Who can attend: Anyone