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 descriptionsin a corpus of US American personal advertisements. Byanalyzing the semantically loaded words in a collection of more than fivehundred classified personal ads taken from various US newspapers, thesewill be exploited for gender stereotypes in the context of desires with regardto dating. The results are expected to reveal that sociocultural stereotypesare not significantly dominant in the advertisements. Instead, an elicitationof characteristics used by advertisers will demonstrate if and how realitycomplies with common gender stereotypes. Moreover, a gender-neutrallexical inventory is likely to be found in the data.A theoretical section will introduce terminological aspects of this thesisas well as the employed conceptualizations of gender and genderstereotypes. The analysis of these in personal advertisements will beconducted on a corpus stored in a Tamino database. This means that, incontrast to relational databases (e.g. SQL, Microsoft Excel), the data will beaccessible in tree-structured XML files. This provides for a morelinguistically formal yet flexible annotation. The most frequently used lexicalitems will be grouped according to a selection of semantic fields related tothose 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 wordfrequencies will be assessed across genders. Following this, a comparisonbetween the attested lexicons of heterosexual males and females will beconducted. The resulting preferences will be discussed in the course of thispaper with regard to gender stereotypes such as 'women look for financialsecurity' and 'men focus on looks'. Finally, a contrastive picture of thereality of personal advertisements will be drawn.