Chung, Eugene. 2017. Register Differences in Collocational Characteristics of MAN and WOMAN. Language Information. Volume 24. 51-76. The purpose of this study is to investigate the distinctive characteristics of the gender referring nouns, MAN and WOMAN, and their collocates depending on which register is used, i.e. written or spoken language. Collocates are words that occur near a given word, and they can provide useful insight into the meaning and usage of the words near which they occur. We employed the Corpus of Contemporary American English (henceforth, COCA) which is composed of written text (newspapers, academic journals, magazines, novels) and spoken text (broadcast). Mutual Information was used as a statistical measurement to extract collocates. The study compares the collocates of 'man, woman, male, female' in registers of written text and spoken text from the COCA. We focused on the lexical pairs ‘man’ vs. ‘woman’ and ‘male’ vs. ‘female’ to identify participation and influence of gender difference reflecting in the media. We extracted 100 collocates for each target word and then compared their relationships by using Pajek (Ver. 4.04). The study shows that there significant differences between written and spoken text in the semantic field of collocates for the gender referring nouns. Our findings point to a fundamental asymmetry in the use of the two genders. Men are expected to be interested in fashion and public oriented settings. Compared to men, women tend to be more complex; they are family-oriented, but also they are socially involved. There are also substantial differences in patterns of collocation from singular form and plural form. This study makes a contribution to the study of register variation of gender nouns. (Korea University)
Key words: Gender Referring Noun, Man, Woman, Female, Male, Corpus of Comtemporary American English (COCA), Co-occur, Collocation, Register Variation, Written Text, Spoken Text.