“A Man Grabbed a Female and Robbed her of a Purse”: A Corpus Study on the Use of the Collocates Female/Man vs. Male/Woman in American English
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The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how female and male as nouns are used in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). There is ongoing conversation on social media on the sexist associations in the use of female as a noun. The general opinion seems to be that female is used in an illogical and contradictory manner when referring to women, and that men are not referred to as males in the same manner. There is, however, limited research on female as a noun. This thesis focuses on two pairs of collocates from various aspects: female/man and male/woman.
This study consists of both quantitative and qualitative aspects; the overall numbers of female/man and male/woman in COCA, as well as potential diachronic changes are examined in the entire corpus (from 1990 to 2019). Smaller samples are also selected in order to distinguish qualitative aspects and the contexts of how female and male are used. Data on the samples is divided into inappropriate, appropriate and ambiguous instances. The inappropriate instances are further divided into six categories: sexualization/objectification, sexism besides sexualization, racism, highlighting sexism, highlighting racism, and biological or medical.
The results show that the male/woman collocates, in fact, occur more frequently than the female/man collocates despite common belief. Use of both pairs of collocates has decreased over time. For the most part, the male/woman collocates occur quite consistently more frequently than the female/man collocates, but the decrease is larger among the male/woman collocates. Examination of the samples provides evidence that female is used in an inappropriate manner more than male. Female is most frequently used inappropriately in the form of sexualization or objectification, while more than half of the inappropriate uses of male are used inappropriately in contexts that highlight sexism. The male/woman collocates are also used more frequently in an inappropriate manner in biological or medical contexts than the female/man collocates. Despite general belief that in academic contexts the use of female and male as nouns is more acceptable, a large number of instances occurring in academic contexts use female and male inappropriately.