She and he in the Wall Street Journal
wsj
As part of a project on non-standard pronoun case in coordination (
Me and him did it;
between you and I), Stanford
student Tommy Grano did some searching through various sources of data,
among them the
Wall Street Journal
corpus (formal writing, containing very few non-standard pronouns) and
AltaVista (more informal writing, with more non-standard pronouns, but
still not many), and stumbled on a much larger and more striking
difference
between the two sources as representatives of different genres: a big
sex bias in the
WSJ.
There were five relevant variables in this little study, which looked
at conjunctions of personal pronouns with nonpronominal NPs:
person/number of the pronoun; case of the pronoun (nominative vs.
accusative); order of pronoun and the NP; grammatical function of the
coordination (subject vs. direct object vs. object of a preposition);
and source (
WSJ vs.
AV). Grano found
small numbers for some person/number combinations (1/pl
and
3/pl), for some orders of pronoun
and NP, and for non-standard case choices.
But substantial numbers of
examples
appeared for the standard subject case choices NP
and I,
he and NP, and
she and NP. (Other studies suggest
that
I prefers second
position,
while the other
pronouns tend to prefer first position, which puts light elements
before heavier ones.)
There were 85 conjunctions of pronoun and NP in
WSJ, 574 in AV. The results,
expressed as percentages of these totals for particular combinations,
source by source:
conjunction
|
WSJ
|
AV
|
NP and I
|
8%
|
9%
|
he and NP
|
64%
|
18%
|
she and NP
|
6%
|
26%
|
Conjunctions involving 1/sg are pretty much the same in the two
sources, but those involving 3/sg are wildly different: in AV, male and
female are more or less comparable, though with an advantage to female;
but in
WSJ, it's male over
female by an enormous margin. The
Wall Street Journal seems to talk
about men in connection with others (other people, or ideas, or
whatever) vastly more than women. In everyday life, as sampled
(however imperfectly) by AltaVista, women are slightly in the majority,
but in the world of public events, women are of little note.
Well, we knew that, but, still, I was a bit shaken by the size of the
difference.
[Buried in that table is the fact that in
WSJ, a full 70% of the conjunctions
are 3/sg, while in AV it's only 44%. Not surprising, since AV has
a lot of second-person reference (which was not of much interest to
Grano, since
you shows no
case differentiation).]
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at May 6, 2005 05:01 PM