Although women are generally regarded as socially disadvantageous, gender images are always fixed and might also change with time. The following sections review some studies on social changes, which concern the shifts of gender roles in particular.
2.5.1 Luo (1981)
Luo (1981) analyzes the special column “women’s mailbox” in newspapers, which aims to answer the questions that women encounter. Questions discussed in this column are diverse, such as sex, marriage, family, occupations, and partners.
Luo suggests that it can be discovered from those articles in the columns that women’s position has been lifted, because what women need and want is expressed instead of being ignored. Also, from the information provided in the column, it could be observed that women’s life experiences start to be emphasized.
However, Luo also points out a formidable obstacle to women’s lift in position.
She suggests that many women still do not know how to fight for their rights, or they even do not want to fight at all. They have got used to tolerating the inequality occurring around them. Luo believes that women’s mailbox could be a good way to reeducate women. Through the column, the idea of gender equality could be conveyed to change women’s traditional values and break the stereotypes.
2.5.2 Lin (1998)
In order to investigate the change of men’s roles in society, Lin’s (1998) study
focuses on advertisements in magazines, for she suggests that how men are displayed in these advertisements could reflect their social roles. She points out that during the period between 1988 and 1997, the advertisements in magazines kept demonstrating gender stereotypes. Men are shown with the masculine image and appear mostly in their professions instead of being in their family. As for women, they are still presented with the image of submission.
However, it is observed that men’s roles become diverse with time, but the change is very slow. Apart from their profession and family, they start to develop other interests. Although men’s roles are changing, they are still those who own the most of power.
2.5.3 Other Related Studies
In Section 2.4.3, it is pointed out that gender discrimination in language is still displayed in Litoselliti’s (2006) and Caldas-Coulthard’s (1996) studies, and that some actual changes in women’s features are still undoubtedly revealed, such as women’s valuing personal styles and women’s freedom to enjoy sex. This may indicate social change to some degree.
Similarly, Benwell (2003) also states that men’s magazines also start to accentuate the concept and image of “new man”, a new form of masculinity. “New man” is presented as fashionable, healthy, leisure, stylish, and attaching importance to appearance. Intriguingly, some of them are in fact the features of stereotypical women.
Visser’s (2002) study on gender stereotypes also reveals the trace of social change. She asked the participants to categorize some terms into “femininity” and
“masculinity”. As Section 2.4.2 has displayed, it is found that the participants’
preferences fit gender stereotypes well. However, she further indicates that there are
also some changes when the old data and new data are compared, such as the rising of men’s awareness of their appearance, the awakening of women’s sexual right, and the independence of women. The change in traits associated with men and women may imply gender stereotype change in society.
According to Lakoff (1975), social change predicates language change. By observing language changes, we might be able to find what concepts are undergoing changes with time.
2.6 Collocation
Collocation has been extensively investigated, for it is one of the conventions of language use. The present study adopts a most general viewpoint on collocation and simply treats collocation as an umbrella term, regarding collocation as a phenomenon that a word habitually occurs with some words or some words containing specific features. The related studies on collocation could help us gain a better understanding of word combination. The following sections summarize several researchers’ studies on collocation and word combination.
2.6.1 Firth (1957)
Firth (1957) may be the first person in the literature who investigated collocations. He claims that collocation is “the company words keep together”
(p.196). Besides, it is indicated that meanings between words could be differentiated at five levels, i.e., orthographic (spelling or word form), phonological (pronunciation), grammatical (part of speech), situational (social or pragmatic meaning), and collocational levels. Collocation does play an important role in distinguishing words’ meanings.
In addition, Firth also states that there are two types of word associations,
paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations. Paradigmatic relation refers to the situation that words could be placed in an identical grammatical category, and syntagmatic relation indicates that words co-occur with each other in a linear order. Therefore, collocations are word relations at the syntagmatic level. Firth’s ideas are widely adopted by the following studies on collocation.
2.6.2 Benson et al. (1986, 1997)
Benson, Benson, and Ilson (1986) categorize lexical combinations into 5 types according to their degrees of cohesiveness: free combinations, collocations, transitional combinations, idioms, and compounds. The loosest combination is free combinations (e.g. to analyze/report/investigate a murder). Collocations are more fixed than free combination (e.g. to commit murder), and the meaning of a whole combination is quite related to the meaning of the parts. Therefore, it is relatively unacceptable when other words are used to replace any word in a collocation. As for transitional combinations (e.g. the facts of life), their degree of cohesiveness is higher than collocations because they are less alterable. Idioms (e.g. to have one’s back to the wall) are rather fixed expressions, and the meanings of their parts may not constitute the meaning of the whole. The most stable combination is compounds (e.g. floppy disk).
Benson et al. (1997) further categorize collocations into two types in the BBI Dictionary of English Word Combinations: grammatical collocations and lexical collocations. Grammatical collocations refer to phrases that comprise a dominant word and a grammatical structure (e.g., adjective + preposition combination, such as proud of and satisfy with). Lexical collocations are combinations composed by nouns, adjectives, verbs or adverbs without prepositions (e.g., acquire knowledge).
2.6.3 Sinclair (1991)
Sinclair (1991) proposes four word co-occurrence relations in extended lexico-semantic units, including collocations, colligation, semantic preference, and discourse prosodies. A collocation is merely a lexical relation that makes no reference to syntax, and it contains a pair of a node and a collocate. A node is the word form, lemma (a lexeme or a dictionary headword), or other pattern investigated, and it co-occurs with collocates (e.g., loud/thunderous/rapturous/spontaneous applause). A collocation relation also implies that the combination frequently occurs in the corpora. Colligation is syntactic relation, indicating the combination of grammatical categories or the pairing of lexis and grammar (e.g., in some/many/most/both cases). Collocation and colligation are often related to each other, for specific grammatical patterns are sometime more frequent than other ones in a collocation relation. Semantic preference is the relation between a lemma (or word form) and a set of semantically relevant or similar words (e.g., large number/scale/amounts/areas, all the terms are related to the quantity and size). A discourse prosody is the additional meaning extended from the combination (e.g., cause often related to unwelcome events, such as to cause problem/damage/trouble).
Discourse prosodies often reveal speakers’ evaluation of specific events.
2.6.4 Stubbs (2001a, 2001b, 2002)
Like what Firth (1957) has suggested, Stubbs (2001a, 2001b) maintains that collocation is a syntagmatic relation that words frequently appear together in a linear string, as shown below:
collocates…node…collocates span
A node appears with its collocates within a specific span conventionally.
Collocations are idiomatic but not idioms, since the relationship between a node and its collocates is not fixed. The relationship between a node’s collocates is paradigmatic.
Although many studies on cohesion, collocations, phrase-like units tend to decrease the contribution of collocations to text cohesion and treat them more as linguistic units, (e.g., Damerau and Mandelbrot 1973), Stubbs suggests that collocations do play a role in enhancing both cohesion and coherence because they carry some stereotyped notions shared by people from the same culture background without definite evaluation. The information collocations carry is important to cohesion. Also, collocations convey some background assumptions and cultural connotations and influence people’s text reading.
Stubbs (2002) further specifies that nodes and their collocates are related to each other in meaning. Besides, semantic relationship also exists among the collocates of a node. The frequent interaction between a node and its collocates might generate some conventional meaning of those expressions, referred as semantic prosody (Louw 2000:57) or discourse prosody, as discussed in Sinclair (1991). For example, it is discovered that the phrase build up of appears more frequently with negative terms, while build up a occurs more frequently with positive ones.