A Corpus-based Analysis of Collocations of the Words Woman and Man in Contemporary Written Persian Language: A Step to Study Sexism Discourse

In sexism, the juxtaposition of words forms can elevate one gender above another and unsettle equality between genders. In the present work, sexism is examined in a corpus-based manner through qualitative and quantitative analysis of collocations of the words woman and man in Hamshahri Corpus version 2. In the present research which has been done on the basis of Baker’s (2006, 2010a, 2017) corpus-based approach, the collocations of the words man and woman have been identified using Antconc software functions of collocates and concordance and the data have been classified semantically. The results show the existence of sexism in the collocations of written Persian language; while both of the words man and woman co-occur with collocations having neutral-meaning, qualitative analysis of collocations categories reveals that women, in comparison to men are in lower position. Also, sexism against women is observed in categories like family, job, personal characteristics, art and crime.