Social Gender Construction in Political Context: A Corpus-Based Study of Lexical Differences across Genders

Abstract

Anchored on the public stereotype towards the dichotomization of gender and the social gender construct theory, the study examines the gender differences in terms of lexical choice manifested by the selected 20 U.S. presidential candidates from the year 2012 to 2020 and presents the changes of each gender group in a male-dominated political context. The corpus of this study consists of 60257 lexis of 10 male politicians and 63095 words of 10 female politicians which are extracted from their announcement and campaign speeches. Findings obtained from the results based on the quantitative research design and the application of CLAWS, AntConc and chi-square test reveal statistically significant gender-based differences. The findings support that even though male and female presidential candidates have almost the same priorities of usage in general lexical categories, the lexical choice of male candidates was relatively close to feminization while women tended to be neutral. Finally, it further speculates that the candidates of differing gender enjoy a distinctive consciousness on the social gender construction in public discourse to challenge or neutralize public stereotypes of gender identity. In view of the findings, the study recommends a questionnaire survey to verify the inference on gender color displayed by different language variables and an extensive database to enable a greater validity of the results in the future.