The Truth about Mid-Life Singles in the USA

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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.