Naughty Boys and Sexy Girls

Although stereotypical gender patterns have been reported in a number of studies over the last forty years or so, and attempts to address gender-biased representation have been made, males and females are still represented differently in modern English-speaking societies. Further research uncovering gender-marked language and biased gender structures is therefore needed. The study presented here is a contribution to the still small, but nevertheless growing number of studies employing corpora to study the discourse of gender. The focus of the study is the representation of young individuals in a previously unexplored one-hundred-million-word web corpus of English, the New Model Corpus (NMC). Following earlier work on collocation and gender, the aim of this paper is to explore what verbs collocate with the lemmas girl and boy as subject and object and what words modify them in a worldwide corpus of English. The purpose is to reveal how these two lemmas pattern with other words, and in doing so point at cultural and social meanings embodied in the representation of girls and boys.