Return to search

Sexist Language : Gender marking of occupational terms and the non-parallel treatment of <em>boy </em>and <em>girl</em>

<p>In everyday life women are exposed to sexist language. Terms and usages that exclude or discriminate women are referred to as sexist language. This takes into account that one presumes that maleness is the standard, the norm, and that femaleness is the non-standard, or the exception. The aim of this paper was to find whether gratuitous modifiers such as <em>girl, lady, female </em>and <em>woman </em>are used more frequently than the male markings and whether <em>girl </em>is used to a wider extent than <em>boy</em> to denote an adult. The aim includes two aspects of sexist language. Firstly, the aspect of calling women <em>girls</em> and men <em>men</em>, called non-parallel treatment. Secondly, the fact that it is more common for unmarked terms to refer to males while when referring to females a marked term is needed. As primary source for the study the Time Corpus was used, which is an online corpus containing over 100 million words and ranges from 1923-2007. The conclusion of this essay was that the female sex is more commonly marked and that <em>woman/women</em> are the most commonly used premodifiers. Gender markings most likely apply to occupations and labels which are thought of as either typically male or female. Furthermore, it was found that <em>girl </em>was used to a wider extent than <em>boy</em> to denote an adult. In addition, the results presented a possible change of trends where <em>girl</em> referred to a child to a larger extent in contemporary English.</p>

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA/oai:DiVA.org:vxu-5836
Date January 2008
CreatorsMagnusson, Sophia
PublisherVäxjö University, School of Humanities
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, text

Page generated in 0.0016 seconds