Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-tj2md Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T15:01:29.767Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Applying keyword analysis to gendered language in the Íslendingasögur

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 October 2014

Tam T. Blaxter
Tam T. Blaxter*
Affiliation:
Pembroke College, Cambridge CB2 1RF, UK. ttb26@cam.ac.uk
Get access

Abstract

Keyword analysis has been used to investigate properties of style and genre, as a tool in discourse analysis, and as a method of identifying differences between the speech of distinct social groups. It has often been criticised as a blunt tool which can exaggerate what differences are present and fails to distinguish between quite distinct phenomena. However, it remains a very powerful tool for wide analysis of systematic differences between corpora when used with sufficient scepticism. This paper uses keyword analysis to examine differences between the speech of male and female characters in the Íslendingasögur, narrative prose texts composed in Iceland in the 13th and 14th centuries. This dataset is of particular interest because such representations of speech are the only window on the language of social groups who were not involved in text production in medieval societies. It aims to demonstrate a rigorous application of keyword analysis, exemplifying what it can and, crucially, what it cannot show.

Keywords

corpus linguisticsgenderkeywordsOld Icelandicsociolinguistics
Type
Research Article
Information
Nordic Journal of Linguistics , Volume 37 , Issue 2: Corpus Linguistics and the Nordic Languages , October 2014 , pp. 169 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © Nordic Association of Linguistics 2014 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Anthony, Lawrence. 2012. Antconc: A Freeware Concordance Program for Windows, Mactintosh OS X, and Linux. http://www.antlab.sci.waseda.ac.jp/software.html (30 November 2012).Google Scholar
Baker, Paul. 2004. Querying keywords: Questions of difference, frequency, and sense in keywords analysis. Journal of English Linguistics 32, 346–359.Google Scholar
Baker, Paul. 2008. Sexed Texts: Language, Sexuality and Gender. London: Equinox.Google Scholar
Baker, Paul. 2010. Sociolinguistics and Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Baker, Paul. 2012. Mars and Venus reappraised: Using the Manhattan Distance to explore the sex differences paradigm in the BNC. Presented at the UCREL Corpus Research Seminar Series, Lancaster.Google Scholar
Bestgen, Yves. 2014. Inadequacy of the chi-squared test to examine vocabulary differences between corpora. Literary & Linguistic Computing 29 (2), 164–170.Google Scholar
Blaxter, Tam T. 2013. Sociolinguistic variation in the Old Icelandic family sagas. MPhil thesis, University of Oxford.Google Scholar
Brown, Penelope & Levinson, Steven C.. 1987. Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage (Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics 4). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Cameron, Deborah. 2007. The Myth of Mars and Venus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Cleasby, Richard, Vigfússon, Guðbrandur & Dasent, George Webbe. 1894. An Icelandic–English Dictionary, Based on the Ms. Collections of the late Richard Cleasby. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Culpeper, Jonathan. 2009. Keyness: Words, parts-of-speech and semantic categories in the character-talk of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14 (1), 29–59.Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. 2005. Null-hypothesis significance testing of word frequencies: A follow-up on Kilgarriff. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1 (2), 277–294.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Grob, Lindsey M., Meyers, Renee A. & Schuh, Renee. 1997. Powerful/powerless language use in group interactions: Sex differences or similarities? Communications Quarterly 45 (3), 282–303.Google Scholar
Harrington, Kate. 2008. Perpetuating difference? Corpus linguistics and the gendering of reported dialogue. In Harrington, Kate, Litosseliti, Lia, Sauntson, Helen & Sunderland, Jane (eds.), Gender and Language Research Methodologies, 85–102. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
Helgadóttir, Sigrún, Valsdóttir, Eyrún, Rögnvaldsdóttir, Auður & Stefánsdóttir, Hjördís. 2012–. Mörkuð íslensk málheild. Reykjavík: Stofnun Árna Magnússonar í íslenskum fræðum. http://mim.hi.is/index.php (12 May 2012).Google Scholar
Hirschman, Lynette. 1994. Female–male differences in conversational interaction. Language in Society 23, 427–442.Google Scholar
Johannessen, Janne Bondi. 2008. The pronominal psychological demonstrative in Scandinavian: Its syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 31 (2), 161–192.Google Scholar
Kilgarriff, Adam. 2005. Language is never, ever, ever, random. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1 (2), 263–276.Google Scholar
Oakes, Michael & Farrow, Malcom. 2007. Use of the chi-squared test to examine vocabulary differences in English language corpora representing seven different countries. Literary & Linguistic Computing 22 (1), 85–99.Google Scholar
Rayson, Paul. 2004. Keywords are not enough. Presented at the Invited Talk for JAECS (Japan Association for English Corpus Studies), Chuo University, Tokyo. http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~paul/publications/jaecs_tokyo04.pdf (22 December 2013).Google Scholar
Rayson, Paul. 2008. From key words to key semantic domains. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13 (4), 519–549.Google Scholar
Rayson, Paul, Leech, Geoffrey & Hodges, Mary. 1997. Social differentiation in the use of English vocabulary: Some analyses of the conversational component of the British National Corpus. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 2 (1), 133–152.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rögnvaldsson, Eiríkur & Helgadóttir, Sigrún. 2011. Morphological tagging of Old Norse texts and its use in studying syntactic variation and change. In Sporleder, Caroline, van den Bosch, Antal & Zervanou, Kalliopi (eds.), Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, vol. 2, 63–76. Berlin: Springer.Google Scholar
Schmid, Hans-Jörg. 2003. Do men and women really live in different cultures? Evidence from the BNC. In Wilson, Andrew, Rayson, Paul & McEnery, Tony (eds.), Corpus Linguistics by the Lune (Łódź Studies in Language 8), 185–221. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Shibamoto Smith, Janet S. 2004. Language and gender in the (hetero)romance: ‘Reading’ the ideal hero/ine through lover's dialogue in Japanese romance fiction. In Okamoto, Shigeko & Smith, Janet S. Shibamoto (eds.), Japanese Language, Gender, and Ideology, 113–130. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Shibamoto Smith, Janet S. & Occhi, Deborah J.. 2009. The green leaves of love: Japanese romantic heroines, authentic femininity, and dialect. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13 (4), 524–546.Google Scholar
Stubbs, Michael. 1995. Collocations and semantic profiles: On the cause of trouble with quantitative studies. Functions of Language 1 (2), 23–55.Google Scholar
TEI Consortium (ed.). 2007. TEI P5: Guidelines for electronic text encoding and interchange, 2.1.0. Last updated 17/06/12. TEI Consortium. http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/ (16 August 2012).Google Scholar
Xiao, Zhonghua & McEnery, Anthony. 2005. Two approaches to genre analysis: Three genres in Modern American English. Journal of English Linguistics 33, 62–82.Google Scholar