Md Nazmus Saqueb Kathon: Gender Representation and Evaluation in American English: Synchronic and Diachronic Corpus-based Studies

Abstract

This compilation thesis investigates the linguistic representation and evaluation of gender in American English across registers and historical periods. The overarching aim is to examine how language portrays and positions males and females, and how attitudes, viewpoints, or feelings toward them are expressed in relation to attributes such as personality traits, physical appearance, and societal importance. Representation is analyzed through syntactic framing (subjecthood, clause position) and semantic roles (e.g., agent, experiencer) of male/female referents, as well as the use of explicitly gender-marked forms. Evaluation is operationalized via adjectives co-occurring with gender-specific (pro)nominal expressions, typically conveying positive or negative meaning. A corpus-based methodology combining quantitative analysis with qualitative interpretation is employed to trace patterns of continuity and change, situated within broader sociohistorical contexts such as the women’s suffrage movement, second-wave feminism, and #MeToo.

The four articles address complementary aspects of the overarching aim. Article 1 examines contemporary American English, showing how evaluations of males and females vary across semantic domains, registers, and positivity/negativity. Article 2 takes a diachronic perspective, tracing continuities and shifts in gender evaluation spanning the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries across fiction, newspapers, and non-fiction. Article 3 investigates gender representation and evaluation in two ideologically distinct online news outlets (HuffPost and the Washington Examiner) before and after #MeToo, with particular attention to syntactic and semantic framing. Article 4 traces the evolution of gender-marked forms in American television and film across the 1970s, 1990s, and 2010s, focusing on feminizing suffixes, gendered premodifiers, and -man/-woman compounds.

The findings show persistent gender asymmetries in linguistic practice, with men evaluated more frequently and extensively than women. Even so, the analyses reveal gradual diversification in the linguistic portrayal of women’s roles and competencies, particularly in late-twentieth-century non-fiction and newspapers. Post-#MeToo news contains fewer overt evaluations but enduring stereotypes, with outlet-specific shifts in the portrayal of agency and vulnerability and modest changes in syntactic foregrounding. Explicitly gender-marked forms (especially -man terms) recede, though items like actress increase, and television moves toward neutrality faster than film, reflecting that linguistic change is uneven, context-dependent, and closely tied to ongoing negotiations of gender roles in society.