LEXICAL GENDER IN WRITTEN BUSINESS ENGLISH: A CORPUS-BASED APPROACH

Abstract

The lexical gender in specialist communication is examined in this essay. In a 10 million word corpus of written Business English, styles of address, professional titles, and the phrase "generic man" were the main topics of analysis. The results are discussed after a brief introduction and discussion of the literature on both gender in specialized communication and related corpus-based views of lexical gender in General English. Results were inconsistent. On the one hand, the "male-as-norm" notion supports common gender stereotypes. We know that in everyday language, gender is not talked about, not even mentioned. In other words, it is not the type of information that is predicated of a referent. It is not often uttered such statements as:’she’sa woman’or ‘my computer is a thing‘. These sentences are perfectly grammatical of course, and they make sense, but they are not uttered. Or if they are gender nous such as ‘woman’or ‘man’are not used to convey information about gender but some implicature, often close to stereotype:’She spends a fortune on perfume.–Well, what do you expect, she’sa woman’.[1]  For instance, there are more than 100 references to men than women in the corpus for each woman. On the other side, proponents of non-sexist English have also had an impact on written Business English. For instance, Ms is more frequently used than Mrs. and Miss, supporting the notion that Ms is more appropriate in professional contexts. The final section of this article explores the positive effects that the study’s research findings may have on business English instruction.