Gender Stereotypes in Film Language: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis
Authors: Lucia Busso, Gianmarco Vignozzi (Università di Pisa, 2017)
Topic: Gender and Inclusive Language Studies

Abstract
The present study concentrates on the representation and the reception of gender stereotypes. The analysis was first carried out on an ad hoc corpus of cult romantic comedies and dramedies of AngloAmerican pop contemporary culture and secondly with a perception test. Both the corpus-driven analysis and the test results provide useful insights into the representation, recognition and entrenchment of gender stereotypes in language and in western culture. The preliminary findings generally confirm and validate the scientific literature, although showing some notable new elements. Italiano: Il lavoro si incentra sulla rappresentazione e la percezione degli stereotipi di genere. La ricerca è stata prima condotta su un corpus costruito ad hoc di film cult della cultura pop contemporanea anglo-americana appartenenti ai generi romantic comedy e dramedy, ed in seguito con un test di percezione. Il duplice approccio utilizzato fa luce sulla rappresentazione, il riconoscimento e il radicamento degli stereotipi di genere nella lingua e nella cultura occidentale. I risultati si trovano in linea con la letteratura, sebbene mostrino alcuni nuovi elementi.

Introduction
In the era of digital revolution and screen proliferation, movies have undoubtedly acquired, thanks to their significance, a pivotal role in shaping our worldviews. In fact, popular films have the power to sway our collective imagination and influence our attitudes on crucial issues related to race, class, gender, etc. Characters in films reflect and perpetuate the status and options of them in today’s society and culture, and thus play an active part in creating symbolic role models (Kord 2005, Bednarek 2015). Accordingly, it is interesting to examine the ways in which both females and males are represented on celluloid to better understand the ideologies they bear, and how gender identities are idealized. There seems to be wide agreement on the fact that characterization in filmic discourse heavily relies on archetypes and simplification AUTHOR. This is especially true in gender representation, as stereotypical roles simplify characterization in a way that it is easier to be received by the viewing audience. This, however, often results in an extreme polarization of gender roles. Film dialogues are therefore an ideal ground on which to study gender stereotypes and their linguistic representation and reception. Hence, this paper aims to fathom the discursive representation and the perception of well-established gender stereotypes in the dialogues of a sample of cult British and American romantic comedies, by integrating the tools of discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and perception analysis.

Conclusion
The present paper proposes an original take on investigating gender stereotypes in language. The novelty in our approach lies in the hybrid methodology that falls neither in the tradition of the literature on “gendered discourse” nor in the more recent field of corpus linguistics, but combines the two and adds insights from psycholinguistics as well. This kind of integrated analysis provided us with preliminary results that help identify gender archetypical roles, behaviours and linguistic representations in modern western culture. What is interesting to note is that the gender representations coming to light from our corpus of pop-culture films are based on features that are now dismissed as clichéd and stereotypical by the literature AUTHOR, but which seem to be nonetheless entrenched in our interpretation of reality. The archetypical depiction of characters is particularly evident in popular comedies, which do not examine characters’ psychology in depth. The test validated our assumption that film language stereotypically portrays the way in which men and women talk drawing on recognisable traits attached to femininity and masculinity in our culture. In fact, speakers were mostly able to correctly assign the utterances to the right gender. In addition, all our informants showed metalinguistic –or second-level –awareness about stereotypical concepts and linguistic clues, and several of them also provided us with insightful and creative inferences based on the event described in the utterance. We interpret this as a sign of stereotypes being conceptual in nature, deeply entrenched in our representation of the world and accessed via linguistic clues. The “reverse stereotypes” also reinforce this idea.