This thesis aims to investigate the differences between what collocations are used for ‘husband’ and ‘wife’ in films and contemporary culture. The comparison spans through different decades and the decades will also be compared and analysed. The thesis will investigate if the collocates reflect the societal change and if so, can the results relate to existing power structures/gender roles? The background for the thesis consists of information about marriage history, films and their influence on culture, what a collocation is and previous research on collocation. The method used for this thesis was Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies which includes both corpus studies and discourse analysis. Consequently, a more in-depth understanding of the results and tables were given. To classify the collocates collected from the Movie Corpus (which represents movies) and the Corpus of Historical American English (representing culture) the results are presented Caldas-Coulthard and Moon’s categorisation schema. After this, in the discussion, the proportional distribution is presented because the corpora are different sizes and this way they can be compared correctly. The conclusion is that movies reflect culture somewhat, but it lacks in some areas. However, some patterns can be found. ‘Wife’ and ‘husband’ are discussed differently, and the difference in collocates shows that. Moreover, the results seem to reflect typical stereotypes that do exist and has existed.

This essay examines how the sense of the word parent has developed and possibly changed during the 19th and 20th centuries. The hypothesis is that father was the most common meaning in the early 1800s and that by the end of the 20th century it had changed into having a more general sense, denoting all caregivers of a child. The research has been performed as a corpus study, looking at and analyzing corpus data in the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) from three different decades – the 1820s, the 1900s, and the 1990s. The word parent was analyzed in 100 samples from each of the three decades by studying the expanded contexts of the word in COHA, and categorizing the perceived meaning into one of seven definitions. The results show that father was the most common sense in the 1820s, while origin was the most frequent meaning in the 1900s. Last but not least, in the samples from the 1990s, either as sense had the highest frequency. Occurrences are analyzed both by decade and by source type. The results indicate that one should be mindful about making assumptions about meaning based only on knowledge of the sense as used in current discourse. Any text should be read and understood in context while taking historical circumstances into account. The definition of parent has changed, both in dictionaries and in the public mind, and there are signals that changes in the legal definition of parent are also to be expected.

The aim of this study is to examine how the word manly was used during the 19thcentury. Using the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) it looks atcollocates, the spread across registers and semantic meaning, in order to gain a betterunderstanding of the word and its usage. Due to this term’s connotations with gender,the findings will finally be discussed in relation to Gender Performativity andMasculinity Theory.

With data from the Corpus of Historical American English, this study charts the semantic development of lame, crippled, handicapped, and disabled from the 1900s to the 2010s. Using both qualitative concordance line examination and frequency data, it attempts to determine what types of change have occurred in American English (as represented by COHA) within each adjective. Further, the study isolates each adjective’s ‘human disability’ reference usage from its total frequency to determine a history of how people with disability have been described in the data period. The study finds that the trends of the adjectives’ ‘disability’ reference sense quite cleanly follows a euphemism treadmill (Pinker, 2007: 320): lame’s descent cooccurs with crippled’s ascent, which is also true for crippled and handicapped, and handicapped and disabled, with some overlap. Notable form-centric developments are the emergence of an abstract sense of lame through a metaphorical application of the ‘disability’ sense; the steady frequency of a metaphorical application of crippled to describe ‘damage’ in an inanimate noun referent; the rise of handicapped’s metonymical handicapped parking, against its general trend; and disabled’s semantically narrowed emergence as the most frequent lexical item after the US civil rights movement.