The Truth about Mid-Life Singles in the USA

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.