Man’s Gender and Age as Based on the Collocations of the Estonian Word Mees ‘Man’
Man’s Gender and Age as Based on the Collocations of the Estonian Word Mees ‘Man’

Summary/Abstract: This study explores collocational patterns of the noun mees ‘man’ (in comparison with the data found for naine ‘woman’ and poiss ‘boy’), which can reveal social attitudes and stereotypes of age, gender and behaviour. The corpus based study uses the Estonian Reference Corpus (203 million words altogether) where 75% of the texts are journalistic, so the results will mainly show how people are depicted in the media. Research data was retrieved by means of the Sketch Engine (see Kilgarriff et al. 2004), which enables collocations to be found using lexico-grammatical constructions. Two lexico-grammatical constructions were analysed: the adjectival modifiers of nouns and verbs co-occurring with a noun functioning as a subject. Differences in the descriptions of men, women and boys as reflected in specific adjectives and verbs are discussed under five themes: man’s aggressiveness, man in verbal interaction and his emotions, man in public and private spheres, man’s appearance and personality and man as an adult.

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