Functions of a pair of lexemes man and woman in sentences from the National Corpus of Polish and their application in research on gender stereotypes

Nawoja Mikołajczak-Matyja

Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu


Abstract

The article concerns functions a pair of lexemes man and woman plays in the corpus
material and the potential of these functions to enrich sociolinguistic knowledge.
The purpose of analyses undertaken in the study was to verify the possibility of ordering
occurrences of the semantic binary opposition in Polish sentences with the use of functions
extracted in the analyses of texts in other languages, and the possibility of applying
this ordering in research on gender stereotypes. The analyses were carried out on a set
of 500 sentences with lexemes man and woman selected from the National Corpus of Polish. Results confirmed usefulness of the classification of functions employed in other
languages. However, it was necessary to distinguish an additional function of relations
and dependences, which implies the need to modify the classification for opposition
pairs which are made of names of clearly contrasting socio-cultural categories. Examples
of the analyzed pair of lexemes in two strongest functions are also provided, confirming
the applicability of the presented classification to obtain sociolinguistic data on gender
stereotypes.


Keywords:

corpus linguistics, sociolinguistics, semantics, binary semantic oppositions, gender stereotypes


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Published
2021-09-30

Cited by

Mikołajczak-Matyja , N. (2021). Functions of a pair of lexemes man and woman in sentences from the National Corpus of Polish and their application in research on gender stereotypes. Prace Językoznawcze, 23(3), 115–131. https://doi.org/10.31648/pj.6840

Nawoja Mikołajczak-Matyja  
Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu



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