Corpus-Linguistic Analysis of Speech Communities on Anti-Gender Discourse in Slovene

Abstract

This paper deals with a corpus-linguistic analysis of different text/media types in Slovene with the aim of finding out whether or not any of the communication channels covered by the corpora employed in our analysis serve as a means of unification against the concept of gender, thereby serving as a catalyst for creating and maintaining (new) speech communities. We aim to determine this by extracting the two most commonly misused concepts (terms) in Slovene, i.e. gender theory and gender ideology, and analysing their use in three different corpora of contemporary Slovene: the reference corpus Gigafida 2.0, the corpus of user-generated communication JANES, and the ELEXIS Slovenian Web 2020 corpus. Thus, we confirm that the media for user-generated communication, Twitter in particular, serve as a medium on which speech communities are being built, with their members sharing common views, activities, and beliefs. Hence, Twitter is used as a medium for maintaining and reproducing mutual ideology.

Keywords

• speech community
• gender theory
• gender ideology
• twitter
• corpus linguistics