Sexist stereotypes in the Spanish speaking press: A collocational analysis of the lemmas man and woman

Abstract

This study investigates the often subtle and at times blatant presence of misogynistic language in our daily lives. This study queried the News on the Web (NOW) corpus to conduct an appraisal of the collocational behavior of the lemmas woman and man. Furthermore, by using network graphs, we expand the analysis of collocations beyond traditional corpus approaches which helped provide lexical evidence of stereotypical constructions. This work also intends to promote the use of techniques and tools from corpus linguistics in the digital humanities. The collocational profile drawn up based on corpus evidence shows that man collocated more strongly with adjectives related to mental sharpness, sexuality, and fertility whereas woman patterned with adjectives related to health, marital status, and religious affiliations.

Keywords

• language
• collocation analysis
• graphs
• discourse in the press
• gender
• stereotypes