ABSTRACT
Corpus linguistics is the analysis of naturally occurring language on the basis of computerized corpora. Collocational analysis, a technique for identifying word that appears near the selected word, involves tabulating occurrences of all words within a specified distance of all occurrences of the selected word. The collocation patterns analysed revealed gender stereotypical societal and sociolectal attitudes: men are evaluated in terms of their function and status in society, women in terms of appearance and sexuality. Carroll and Kowitz's pioneering corpus study demonstrates the effectiveness of concordancing techniques including frequency counts, distributional analysis, collocation and key word in context (KWIC) concordances to study gender construction in textbooks. Two popular series of textbooks published in different decades are examined, to investigate whether improvements to women's status over the past twenty years were reflected in changing patterns of gender representation. All the texts are entered electronically by a research assistant and counterchecked by one of the researchers before collocational analyses were performed.
