The Truth about Mid-Life Singles in the USA

Anglický jazyk

The Truth about Mid-Life Singles in the USA

Na objednávku

44.37 €

bežná cena: 49.30 €

O knihe

Master's Thesis from the year 2010 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, Bielefeld University (Fakultät für Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft), course: -, language: English, abstract: This study aims at the sociocultural characteristics in the self- and other descriptions
in a corpus of US American personal advertisements. By
analyzing the semantically loaded words in a collection of more than five
hundred classified personal ads taken from various US newspapers, these
will be exploited for gender stereotypes in the context of desires with regardto dating. The results are expected to reveal that sociocultural stereotypes
are not significantly dominant in the advertisements. Instead, an elicitation
of characteristics used by advertisers will demonstrate if and how reality
complies with common gender stereotypes. Moreover, a gender-neutral
lexical inventory is likely to be found in the data.
A theoretical section will introduce terminological aspects of this thesis
as well as the employed conceptualizations of gender and gender
stereotypes. The analysis of these in personal advertisements will be
conducted on a corpus stored in a Tamino database. This means that, in
contrast to relational databases (e.g. SQL, Microsoft Excel), the data will be
accessible in tree-structured XML files. This provides for a more
linguistically formal yet flexible annotation. The most frequently used lexical
items will be grouped according to a selection of semantic fields related to
those used by Gottburgsen (1995). These will encompass, among others,
those of character traits, socioeconomic status, and outer appearance.
After a description of the collection and processing of the corpus, the word
frequencies will be assessed across genders. Following this, a comparison
between the attested lexicons of heterosexual males and females will be
conducted. The resulting preferences will be discussed in the course of this
paper with regard to gender stereotypes such as 'women look for financial
security' and 'men focus on looks'. Finally, a contrastive picture of the
reality of personal advertisements will be drawn.