ABSTRACT
This chapter makes use of the notion of ‘collocation’, a key concept in corpus linguistic work. Collocation refers to the tendency of certain words or phrases to occur together with other words and phrases. Or, to use Firth’s (1957) famous definition, that idea that ‘You shall know a word by the company it keeps’. In this chapter, collocation is used to investigate how words which describe mock polite behaviours, such as sarcastic or patronising may be gendered. Understanding who certain terms are used to describe is also an essential preparatory stage in any investigation of language and gender. That is to say, before we can ask who does ‘x’, we need to know the full semantic and pragmatic profile of ‘x’. In the case of mock politeness, previous research regarding gender has tended to report than men are more likely to perform sarcasm and more likely to perform patronising behaviours in interactions with women. In this chapter, I aim to step back from these binary comparisons to question whether the terms used are themselves gendered. The tools used in this chapter to investigate and represent collocational relationships include GraphColl (Brezina et al. 2015) and the Sketch Engine thesaurus (Rychlý and Kilgarriff 2007). Two corpora collected online are used for the investigation. The first is the 19 billion-word EnTenTen corpus available on Sketch Engine, and the second is a smaller corpus of 61 million words from a single forum.
