Gender asymmetries of the category “appearance” in the English language (based on the analysis of attributive-nominal word combinations with the core lexemes “man” and “woman”)

Abstract

The relevance of this article is determined by the increasing interest in the asymmetries of gender-sensitive categories like “appearance” or “beauty”. The history of the issue and detailed results of contemporary studies in this field have been outlined in the article. The category of appearance has long been considered gender-biased and asymmetric, being related more to women than to men. Present-day studies offer support for the idea that notions of appearance and beauty are unevenly linked to women, resulting in a multitude of societal and individual difficulties. Certain modern linguists even argue that the concept of beauty is employed as a narrative to perpetuate women’s feelings of discontent and self-criticism. Our work presents an attempt to measure the relevance of this supposition against practical data of the semantic analysis of collocations with the core lexemes “man” and “woman”. A total of 2,814 noun phrases relevant to the category of appearance have been extracted from the texts of the British National Corpus of the English language. Three subcategories have been distinguished in the process of continuous sampling: parametric characteristics of appearance, general characteristics, and assessments. The method of comparative analysis allowed us to make conclusions regarding the degree of validity of assumptions about the asymmetry of the category of appearance in the English language. The analysis was carried out in two stages: the first stage required a general comparison of the amount and semantic nature of attribute-nominal word combinations with the core lexemes “man” and “woman”. The second stage of analysis was based on connotational analysis of nominal constructions semantics in the context of positive and negative characteristics of females’ and males’ appearance. The summary data of the study allowed us to present reliable evidence-based conclusions about the objective characteristics of the category of appearance. The study questions the widespread belief that the category of appearance is gender-biased and suggests considering it as a significant androgenic characteristic relevant to both men and women.