Gender Sensitivity in Specialized Communication: A preliminary corpus-based study of the LSP in Economics

Abstract

Specialized communication tends to be described as impersonal, objective, ideologically neutral and emotionless. This claim, however, needs to be reanalyzed in terms of the often-described ideological component mainly associated with social meaning. This article continues a very recent tradition demanding that ideology should be unveiled in every particular text, including those typically associated with specialized communication. By studying two small subcorpora of economics texts, this article analyzes two basic aspects of the English gender system: one dealing with terminology; the other examining generic reference. The results obtained, although very preliminary, seem to suggest that the so-called gender bias can also be found in specialized texts, which prompt us to propose the development of a new perspective within LSP: gender sensitivity in specialized communication.

Keywords

• Gender
• Economics English
• terminology
• Critical Discourse Analysis