What do genres say about women and men in Chilean spanish? an exploratory study of the frequent combinations of the words woman and man in a stratified reference corpus
Authors
María Natalia Castillo Fadic
Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile
The term mu}er occurs with a high frequency (if), dispersion (D) and use (U) in the Basic Corpus of Chilean Spanish (Fi =340, D =0, 73 and U=248, 2). The word man on the other hand, presents a
higher rate of occurrence (Fi=502, D=0.8 and U=401.6), which is likely to be since both males and females are referred to as men when denoted as humans beings. This hypothesis seems to be confirmed by a similar distribution in four out of five textual genres (Drama, Narrative, Technical-Scientific and Press), but quite a disparate one in the Essay. 9% of the man and woman occurrences are recorded in Drama and 14% of the occurrences of each term appear in Technical-Scientific texts, with an identical distribution. Unlike these, the occurrences of man reaches 26% in the Essay, twice the rate of woman, precisely because in this genre the term man is more frequently used to encompass both as members of the human species. These statistic differences cannot be directly interpreted as an uneven representation of men and women in Chilean Spanish. However, the combinations these lexical units establish, especially when it comes to predictable units, may give some hints to the conception of men and women in society.
Keywords:
lexical statistics, lexico-syntaxis, corpus linguistics, Chilean Spanish, gender studies
Castillo Fadic, M. N. (2019). What do genres say about women and men in Chilean spanish? an exploratory study of the frequent combinations of the words woman and man in a stratified reference corpus. Boletín De Filología, 54(1), pp. 95–117. Retrieved from https://revistaliteratura.uchile.cl/index.php/BDF/article/view/53530
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