27.282, Review: Discourse; Ling Theories; Socioling; Text/Corpus Ling: Baker (2014)

Thu Jan 14 19:45:16 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-282. Thu Jan 14 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.282, Review: Discourse; Ling Theories; Socioling; Text/Corpus Ling: Baker (2014)

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Date: Thu, 14 Jan 2016 14:44:58
From: Liang Zhao [12064068 at qq.com]
Subject: Using Corpora to Analyze Gender

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-4146.html

AUTHOR: Paul  Baker
TITLE: Using Corpora to Analyze Gender
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Liang Zhao, Peking University

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

The book is mainly about how Corpus linguistics uses specialist software to
identify linguistic patterns in large computerized collections of text. It
critically explores two aspects of the way that corpus linguistics techniques
can aid analysis of language and gender: gendered usage (e.g. how do males and
females use language), and gendered representations (e.g. how are males and
females written or spoken about). Six case studies are introduced to specify
the pros and cons of different methods in choosing, creating, tagging and
analyzing a corpus, with reasonable interpretation and argument on different
research designs and tools used. It is strongly recommended to students,
faculties and researchers specialized in sociolinguistics, language and
gender, gender studies, corpus linguistics and sociology, and others who have
an interest in gender, language and corpus research.

A range of techniques and measures are discussed in the book, including
frequencies, keywords, collocations, dispersion, word sketches, downsizing and
triangulation, all in an accessible style, with the help of case studies on
topics which include: directives in spoken conversations, changes in sexist
and non-sexist language use over time, personal adverts, press representation
of gay men, and the ways that boys and girls are constructed through language.
Detailed illustrations of the six case studies not only provide a
comprehensive understanding of how a corpus can be deployed in gender
research, but also help realize the author’s intention of strengthening the
dialogue between those gender researchers and Corpus Linguists, empowering
gender researchers ‘to feel confident in building and exploiting corpora,
while encouraging corpus linguists to incorporate some of the more recent
thinking about Gender and Language into their own studies’ (7).

By tracing how Gender and Language research comes a long way from finding
gender difference to examine gendered discourses, the author points out that
detailed qualitative studies of discourse analysis, being based on small
excerpts of texts, can be combined with approaches that involve techniques
from Corpus Linguistics, which work well on large amounts of data, sometimes
millions or even billions of words. How, then, to build a corpus? How to
analyze it with tools, such as WordSmith, AntConc, R, SPSS, Microsoft Excel or
Log-likelihood (LL)? A brief introduction to the steps and methods of building
and analyzing a corpus is provided, accompanied by an illustration of two
important measures: frequency lists and keyness. Two related aspects of
frequency, collocation and concordance, are explained, the former being based
on quantitative analysis while the latter on a functional qualitative
reasoning. The role of Corpus Linguistics in the field and Gender and
Linguistics research, with how-to questions, comprises the content of Chapter
1. 

Both Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 address the issue of identity and language usage.
Chapter 2 takes a largely corpus-based approach to the issue of linguistic
gender difference. Collecting data from male and female speech in the BNC, the
author concludes that in terms of words, males and females are characterized
as having a great deal of shared languages use, with a few generalizable
differences which can be attributed to social context and dispersion patterns.

Chapter 3 is a corpus-driven study. By focusing only on the disagreement
expressions of female academic supervisors, rather than comparing them against
anything else, the author argues that such a perspective frees researchers
from thinking in terms of gendered ‘over-use’ or ‘under-use’. Examining how
women engaged in a potentially FTA (disagreeing) in the relatively liberal
setting of a university, the author found that a range of different strategies
were employed but there was no single strategy for different cases of
disagreements. Both this chapter and Chapter 2 indicate ‘variation within the
sexes, which is filtered through context’ (203).

Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are dealing with gender representation. In Chapter 4,
focused on a number of aspects of sexist (and non-sexist) language in a large
diachronic corpus of American English stretching back to the early nineteenth
century, the author finds quantifiable male bias in different ways: relational
identification (the tendency for males to be talked about more than females),
male firstness (males to be mentioned first), and genericization (males to be
referred to as generic humans). What is more, in the English language there
are more pejorative terms for women than there are pejorative male
equivalents, and even the equivalents do not have a similar negative force.

Chapter 5 addresses the idea of representation to consider how gay people are
written about in a corpus of articles taken from the popular British newspaper
The Daily Mail. This is a replication of research on Public Discourse of Gay
Men (Baker 2005), in which Baker revisits older data and redoes the analysis.
Compared to the earlier research, the overall outcome is the same with a few
important points that the 10 years younger version of him missed. The analysis
of two sets of articles, taken from 2001-2 and 2008-9, containing the words
‘gay’ and ‘homosexual’, finds that a noticeable shift in discourse has  taken
place: ‘the more negative discourse associating gay people with shame, crime,
violence, promiscuity and sleaze are being replaced with those which
acknowledge the concept of gay rights and relationships and homophobia’
(205).The author also mentions that analyzing expanded concordance lines
enables the identification of features that can run over multiples sentences,
such as legitimation strategies.

Chapter 6 takes a more in-depth look at collocates by addressing different
methods of collocation and by considering questions like how large the
collocational span should be, and whether a confidence-based or
hypothesis-testing technique (or both) ought to be used. Using one of Sketch
Engine’s preloaded corpora, the ukWaC British English corpus, the author
compares collocational relationships for the words ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ (and their
plurals) in order to identify similar and different ways that these identities
are consistently constructed. For example, boys are more often evaluated by
their behavior while girls are evaluated by their appearance. Interpretation,
explanation and critical evaluation of the findings are important, for it
encourages the research not to take for granted the ‘gender differences’
paradigm or men’s privilege in the society; as well as it provides reflections
on how to diminish the reproduction of stereotyping. 

Chapter 7 brings together some of the themes already addressed and blurs the
distinction between language use and gender representation by examining three
small corpora of heterosexual men’s personal advertisements taken from the
website Craigslist. The aim is to find out how heterosexual men use language
to attract female sexual or romantic partners, as well as how different men,
i.e. Australians, Indians and Singaporeans, construct themselves in the
adverts. Since techniques for comparing more than two corpora are not yet
popular, the author gives a detailed explanation of the steps, methods and
tools for creating and tagging the corpora of this research. As he says,
different kinds of corpus analysis techniques will produce different types of
results. That’s why the analysis involves a triangulation of methods on the
same dataset, incorporating analyses of key semantic tags, collocational
networks and concordance lines.

In the concluding chapter, Chapter 8, the author summarizes the main findings
of the book, reflecting on the research outcomes in the individual chapters,
critically evaluating the different methods used, and attempting to address
potential limitations of the corpus method to analyze gender. 

EVALUATION

This book is an updated and expanded version of Baker’s Using Corpora in
Discourse Analysis in 2006. Compared to the 2006 work, this one not only
focuses more on the interrelation between gender and language, but also
updates and expands some of Baker’s ideas around discourse- or social-related
corpus linguistics; for example, some corpora and tools which were not
available in 2006 are introduced, such as the COHA and Sketch Engine.

First, the author gives a detailed explanation on how to use corpus methods in
gender studies, but he keeps being reflective and critical of the methods. By
highlighting what they can do and can’t do, Baker points out that researchers
need to be careful when using corpus methods, for otherwise these methods will
lead them to mistake some pre-existing facts for newly-drawn conclusions.

Second, the author corrects a popular misunderstanding about Corpus
Linguistics that it is only about numbers and calculations; he explains how to
combine quantitative analysis with qualitative reasoning and shows how
productive and interesting such a combination may be. For example, in Chapter
5, the author analyzes in a qualitative way how the negative discourses in the
articles from The Mail are legitimatized. Besides, it is important to consider
whether further analysis is needed to evaluate the findings in terms of ‘who
benefits’. 

Third, the author suggests that the macro analysis should always be put in a
micro social context and be correlated with micro discourses. For example, in
Chapter 7, analysis of the words ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ is inserted into an
overarching representational framework, van Leeuwen’s framework (1996) or
Sunderland’s ‘gender discourse’ (2004).

Fourth, Baker emphasizes the importance and advantages of methodological
triangulation, i.e. approaching a research project in multiple ways. In
Chapter 7 he takes three small corpora of adverts from Craigslist and tries
out three methods of attempting to uncover something interesting about gender
from them – one based on comparisons of key semantic tags, another which used
frequent self-descriptors and considered how they related to each other, and
the final technique which involved a qualitative examination of concordance
lines in order to identify gendered discourses.
Finally, the author mentions more than once the importance of researchers
engaging with non-academics and the wider media, not only to diminish public
stereotypes about gendered language use but also to engender social change of
gendered discourse as a whole. His belief that ‘if our research is not aimed
at improving people’s lives or their environment in some ways, there is little
point in carrying out research’ is very inspiring, for it is always the duty
and responsibility of making a change that motivates us researchers to go
further .

Overall I found Baker’s book to be quite manageable and pleasant to read. It
has a very clear structure that would make the reading accessible. Having
years of experience in using corpora in discourse analysis (Baker 2005, 2006,
2009, 2010; Baker, Gabrielatos and McEnery 2013), Baker makes a good use of
his research experience in describing and illustrating what corpus linguistics
can offer to sociolinguists interested in the relationship between language
and gender.

Baker states that part of the reason for writing the book is to address other
researchers who are either from corpus linguistics and want to look at gender,
or who do research in gender and want to use corpus methods. He makes it clear
that a ‘gender differences’ paradigm is the first thing we need to change and
that this can be changed if there is great integration of gender study and
corpus methods. For such a combination will dispose of the popular metaphors
about Mars and Venus as well as the nonsensical curiosity as to whether men or
women will say ‘I love you’ more. 

REFERENCES

Baker, Paul. 2014. Using corpora to analyze gender. London: Bloomsbury.

Baker, Paul. 2010. Sociolinguistics and Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh Press Ltd.

Baker, Paul. (ed.) 2009. Contemporary Corpus Linguistics. London: Continuum.

Baker, Paul. 2006. Using corpora to Discourse Analysis. 

Baker, Paul. 2005. Public Discourse of Gay Men. London: Routledge.

Baker, Paul., Gabrielatos, Costas and McEnery, Tony. (2013) Discourse Analysis
and Media Attitudes: The Representation of Islam in the British Press.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  

Sunderland, Jane. 2004. Gendered Discourse. Palgrave Macmillan.

van Leeuwen, T. 1996. The representation of social actors in discourse. In
Caldas-Coulthard, C. R., and Coulthard, M. (Eds.), Texts and practices:
Readings in critical discourse analysis. London: Routledge, 32-70.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

I am interested in language and gender, language and identity, language and
globaliation, and sociolinguistics.

Currently I am PhD candidate in the Institute of Linguistics and Applied
Linguistics, Peking University. I am also an assistant professor in the
Northwest University for Nationalities in China.

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