Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

1 PhD Candidate of Linguistics, Shiraz University

2 Assistant Professor of Linguistics, Shiraz University

3 Associate Professor of Linguistics, Shiraz University

Abstract

Sexism in language is a well-known discourse in linguistics. In sexist language, the choice of particular linguistic variations leads to gender bias in favor of one gender and against the other. Sexism has been widely researched through the corpus-based methods in international studies but it has not been investigated by analytical corpus processes in Iranian contexts. This study discusses sexism in Persian language word formation in Hamshahri Corpus version 2 based on Baker’s (2006, 2010, 2017) corpus-based approach. To this end, the words formed by the morphemes man and woman were selected as the representative words in each gender category and the frequency and concordance were explored using Antconc. The data were then examined by first assigning semantic values to the corpus and then running statistical tests. The results showed the existence of sexism in the word formation of the Contemporary Written Persian Language; it seems that the morpheme man is used more frequently than woman in forming words in Persian Language. Moreover, the findings showed that positive characters are represented by the morpheme man and negative characters are represented by the morpheme woman. This study can reveal parts of Iranian’s viewpoints of sexism in order to stop such a social problem.

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Main Subjects

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