“The feminists turned into street wise babes”: A corpus analytical study of
the word field ‘feminism’
Paul Baker, Veronika Koller
Lancaster University
In this paper, we investigate the changing connotations of, and lexical patterns around, the
word ‘feminism’ and semantically related words over the past 70 years.
To this end, we engage in a corpus analytical study of a lexical field ‘feminism’, the elements
of which we searched for in large corpora of general written British English from 1931, 1961,
1991 and 2006, and general written American English from 1961 and 1992.1 As a first step,
we looked at the changing relative frequencies of the search words, as well as the number
of different texts in which they occur, to ascertain the prominence of feminism as a concept.
We then analysed the co-text around the search words as well as their collocates to identify
their semantic prosodies, i.e. the positive or negative connotations that accrue to them
depending on the co-text in which they are typically found.
Preliminary results show that occurrences of the words feminist(s)/feminism are negligible
until the early 1990s. In terms of genres, use of the words has dropped sharply in the
contemporary British press, showing perhaps the diminishing importance of feminism in
public discourse.
Looking at co-text, we find that in the 1990s American texts, occurrences reflect the
differentiation that the movement had by then undergone, yielding noun phrases such as
‘liberal feminist’ or ‘radical feminism’. By contrast, British English of the same decade also
features negatively connoted attributions such as ‘irritated feminists’. The same corpus also
includes disavowals (‘I’m not a feminist but…’) and occurrences of the word ‘post-feminist’.
Overall, it seems that the semantic prosody of the words feminist(s)/feminism until the early
1990s developed from negative to neutral in American texts, while British texts showed a
return to at least partly negative prosody.
Key words: collocation, corpus analysis, diachronic change, semantic prosody
References:
Baker, P. (2009): ‘“Eligible” bachelors and “frustrated” spinsters: Corpus linguistics, gender
and language’, in K. Harrington, L. Litosseliti, H. Sauntson and J. Sunderland (eds) Gender
and Language Research Methodologies. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 73-84.
Baker, P. (2010) ‘Will Ms ever be as frequent as Mr? A corpus-based comparison of
gendered terms across four diachronic corpora of British English’, Gender and Language
(forthcoming).
Sigley, R. and J. Holmes (2002) ‘Looking at girls in corpora of English’, Journal of English
Linguistics 30(2): 138-57.
Address for correspondence:
Veronika Koller
Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA14YT,
United Kingdom, v.koller@lancs.ac.uk
1
These will be supplemented with sections from contemporary corpora of American English.