Half-Witted or Hard-Working-Fun-Loving Women? – A Corpus-Assisted Study of Gendered Collocation in the New Zealand Alpine Club Journal Corpus

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines patterns of representation of gender in a domain-specific heritage corpus. To accomplish this, a heritage corpus of mountaineering texts is examined for the strategies employed in the representation of gendered social actors. The research presented uses the corpus The New Zealand Alpine Journal Corpus, an 8-million-word corpus of the New Zealand Alpine Journal (NZAJ) with more than 5000 texts related to the topic of mountaineering. Mountaineering texts have been relatively overlooked in discourse studies so far, even though, like other leisure and sports discourses, the topic has always been highly political. Furthermore, the topic is outstanding in that it is a sport without spectators that relies almost exclusively on discursive events. The present study looks at frequently occurring patterns and typical ways of how gendered social actors are (re)produced within the NZAJ by looking at adjectival and numeral collocations.