Discourse Society 2010 Caldas Coulthard 99 133

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'Curvy, hunky, kinky': Using corpora as tools for critical analysis

Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and Rosamund Moon
Discourse Society 2010 21: 99
DOI: 10.1177/0957926509353843
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Article
Curvy, hunky, kinky:

Using corpora as tools for
critical analysis
Discourse & Society

21(2) 99133
The Author(s) 2010
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0957926509353843
http://das.sagepub.com
Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard and

Rosamund Moon
University of Birmingham, UK
Abstract
This article, an expanded version of an oral presentation in 1999, uses corpus methodology as a
research tool to investigate how social actors are classified in the public discourse of the media, with
lexis as our point of entry. Our main focus is the nature of the labels which provide categorization,
especially of gender relations. Our main claim is that uses of premodification associated with
the two types of newspapers in Britain and their lexical choices produce differential judgmental
stances that have social effects. In the first of two complementary studies, we discuss the adjective
lexicon of the tabloid press in comparison with quality newspapers, with curvy, hunky and kinky
as exemplars with respect to sexualization and the construction of gender. In our second study,
we discuss adjectival premodification of man, woman, girl and boy in tabloids and broadsheets:
our findings show that the media categorizes people through very specific points of view and
values not always apparent to a non-critical reader. Collocational patterns undoubtedly reveal
societal and sociolectal attitudes, especially in terms of stereotypes of gender, sexualization, age
and behaviour. Our main aim, therefore, is to show that corpus studies can help to deconstruct
hidden meanings and the asymmetrical ways people are represented in the press.
Keywords
adjectives, categorization, corpus linguistics, gender, ideology, journalism, media representation,
sexualization, social actors
Introduction
The origin of this article is a short talk, given in 1999 at a symposium on critical discourse analysis in Birmingham, and subsequently presented at three further seminars.
Corresponding author:
Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard, Centre for English Language Studies, University of Birmingham, Westmere
House, 50 Edgbaston Park Road, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2RX, UK.
Email: c.r.caldas-coulthard@bham.ac.uk
100
Discourse & Society 21(2)
The talk itself had been prompted by a 1998 updating of the Bank of English corpus
(BoE),1 when five million words of text from the British tabloid newspapers, The Sun
and The News of the World, were added. Marked contrasts with other newspapers in BoE
including The Times, The Guardian and The Independent were only to be expected,
but the availability of data in a consistent corpus format made it easy to explore the lexical characteristics of these contrasts. At that time, new methodologies for critical studies
were being discussed and tested, and we decided to try corpus data as a methodological
approach that could give us insights into hidden ideologies. A decade after our speculative and pioneering pilot study (previously unpublished but much quoted) was presented,
corpus investigation has become commonplace as a research tool in Critical Discourse
Studies, proving that our first intuitions about the methodology were correct. Our article
now fits into a body of work which has been developing since the early 1990s, associated
with the research of, for example, Baker, Mautner, Partington, Stubbs, Teubert, Wodak
and many others, and including specifically gender-oriented studies, as we discuss below.
Our special interest was in issues of gender and representation in post-feminist times
in the language of the media: more specifically, in how social actors were categorized in
discourse, and in the nature of the labels which provide such categorization. We explored
this through two small studies of lexis within print media subcorpora. First, we looked at
differences in adjective usage associated with Sun and broadsheet journalism,2 including
the particular cases of curvy, hunky and kinky: an updated version of our original study is
given as Study 1. Second, we looked at asymmetries of gender reference by investigating
the adjectives used to premodify man, woman and girl: an updated version, adding boy,
is given as Study 2.
Study 1: Adjectives in tabloids and broadsheets

When the Sun data was first added to BoE, it quickly became apparent from casual searches
that there were striking differences between the kinds of adjective used in comparison with
BoEs broadsheet data; we felt, in fact, that adjective usage was one distinguishing characteristic. Frequency listings demonstrated the skewed distributions.3 Predictably, some
adjectives occurred much less frequently in the Sun data (for example, academic, administrative, educational, ethnic, etc.), reflecting the different concerns of sets of readers; also,
abnormal, accurate, active, actual, alternative, ancient, appropriate . . . , and so on. Other
adjectives occurred much more frequently: a few were unique to the Sun data, including
playful respellings and blends (hissssterical, ssssensational, sexsational, tworific) and
superlative forms (clumpiest, cringiest, flukiest, tickliest, whackiest).
In our original investigation, we selected those adjectives with much higher rates of
occurrence in The Sun than broadsheets and grouped them roughly according to meanings (cf. the more refined categorization used in Study 2):
relating to size: big, chubby, huge, massive, teen(s)y, wee, ween(s)y
relating to emotions: ashamed, berserk (= angry), desperate, heartbroken, jubilant, miserable,
shameful, shirty (= angry)
Caldas-Coulthard and Moon
101
relating to behaviour, attitudes, actions and achievements: bonkers, brave, bungling, crafty, crackpot, cushy, daft, dozy, hilarious, posh, ready (to do), tacky
relating broadly to lifestyle and interests: boozy, drunken, paranormal, scoreless (of football
matches), skint, tipsy
relating to sex and sexuality: cheeky, curvy, dishy, hunky, jealous, kinky, naughty, raunchy, saucy,
sexy, steamy, stunning
other general evaluatives: amazing, bizarre, brilliant, classy, disappointing, disgusting, evil, fab,
fabulous, fantastic, frustrating, incredible, jammy, lucky, miserable, sensational, stunning, superb,
terrific, unlucky, vile, vital, woeful
There are several interesting features here. The Suns preference for affective big/huge/
massive or berserk/shirty goes along with apparent dispreferences for large and angry.
Many adjectives are informal or colloquial, and many end in the diminutive -y: this is
particularly noticeable in the case of the subset of sexuality adjectives. (Noun diminutives are also common in the Sun data, for example cuties, fatties, etc.) Use of diminutives, traditionally associated with childish language, is also an affective choice. See, for
example, Adams (2001: 58) and Plag (2003: 116ff) for discussion of -y as a diminutive
suffix: compare, too, comments by Geis (1982: 126ff) on the prevalence of -y adjectives
in television advertising. Adjectives such as ashamed, shameful, heartbroken, desperate,
jubilant, brave and bungling reflect a concern with the personal: personal narratives,
individual experiences and actions, the impact of events on individuals and what these
have to do with social judgement or esteem (Martin and White, 2005). Overall, the discourse world which these adjectives characterize appears as physical, passionate, judgemental and people-oriented.
Quantitative data: Adjective comparisons

In our updated study, we continued to explore such differences in adjective usage, using
the 450 million word version of BoE, which was implemented in 20023 and contains
much larger quantities of Sun data and more recent broadsheet data. We also added comparisons with BoE subcorpora of popular magazines and a small but dated subcorpus of
the mid-market tabloid Today, which ceased publication in the mid-1990s. Subcorpus
sizes are shown in Table 1.
Frequencies for selected adjectives within these subcorpora are given in Appendix
1; however, some limitations of our data should be pointed out. First, we only looked
at a small set of adjectives, previously identified as skewed towards The Sun, and
these are therefore unidirectional comparisons. Second, figures are only approximate,
since we did not exclude tokens which occurred in names (Chubby Checker, Fab Four,
Posh Spice,4 etc.), nor did we rigorously exclude tokens which BoEs tagger had incorrectly identified as adjectival (for example, a few cases where the nominal evil had
been mislabelled).
102
Table 1. Journalism subcorpora in BoE

Publication
The Sun, News of the World
Broadsheets
The Guardian
The Independent
The Times, Sunday Times
Today
Popular magazines
Tokens in millions
44.76 m
112.23 m
32.27 m
28.08 m
51.88 m
5.25 m
44.15 m
With respect to The Sun and broadsheets, the new data largely bore out our earlier
findings. Amongst the adjectives most strongly associated with the Sun data were heartbroken (occurring 15 times as frequently), boozy, bungling, hunky (1011 times), dishy,
dozy, raunchy (89 times), bizarre, curvy, cushy, fab, kinky, posh, saucy, sensational,
skint, stunning, wee (56 times). In some cases, however, differences were much less
marked, and in particular tacky now occurred about equally in The Sun and broadsheets.
While we principally looked at contrasts between The Sun and broadsheets, we were
also interested in seeing how far lexical choices in The Sun were typical of populist media
more widely. The Today subcorpus was much older, and that of popular magazines far more
diverse in style, readership and subject matter, but they provided a useful point of comparison, if only for benchmarking purposes. By and large, The Suns adjective lexicon was
much more like those of Today and the magazines than that of the broadsheets, and items
which seem most typical of a convention of popular journalism in BoE data include:
boozy, bungling, curvy, cushy, dishy, dozy, fab, fabulous, heartbroken, hunky, incredible, kinky,
raunchy, saucy, sensational, sexy, shirty, steamy, stunning, wee
There are some items which still seem particularly associated with The Sun bizarre,
boozy, dozy, fantastic, paranormal, posh, skint, woeful though factors here are references to Posh Spice and the names of regular Sun features. See Conboy (2006: 22ff,
2007: 37ff) for a more general discussion of tabloid lexis.
Usage and meanings

Simple comparisons of adjective frequency are interesting, but more important are usage in
context and the kinds of meaning which these adjectives realize. Since we were also concerned
with gender and representation, we chose to focus on the subset of sexuality adjectives (with
their diminutive endings) which we had identified in the Sun data, beginning with curvy,
hunky, kinky. The most obvious approach to examine adjective usage is through collocation,
following in the tradition of Firth and meaning by collocation.5 Here, in addition to ordinary
manual analysis of concordances, we used BoE tools to identify significant collocates, mainly
relying on T-score statistics, but also Mutual Information, wherever we had sufficient data.6
103
Curvy
Small, random samples of concordance lines demonstrate the point of looking at collocation, in this case for curvy in The Sun:
brink of model superstardom with her curvy 342635 figure and fresh-faced
make a 90ft plunge in M&S undies. Curvy 34d Claire has landed a job as the
she is now down to a trim 11st and a curvy 38c-3240 after losing nearly EIGHT
the finer things in life! <subh> Curvy </subh> IF youre in the south and
women. My hips are starting to get curvy and Im pleased that my legs look
Jennifer Ellison, 17, was much curvier at the British Soap Awards than
1967. She hardly fitted the cute, curvy, Australian beach blonde
<subh> LETITIA DEAN </subh> THE curvy blonde was only 16 when she started
divorced Jim over his affair with curvy blonde model Deborah Corrigan, who
snubbed Playboy magazine. The curvy brunette was approached TWICE by
</bl> <dt> 04 November 1999 </dt> CURVY Claire Ross is set to take the
<subh> Claudia: Estate Agent </subh> CURVY Claudia Conners hopes to quit
t one of the judges after Tamzins curvy competition turned out in force for
 Sigourney Weaver plays Max, a curvy conwoman who operates a marriage
trousers and basque showed off Emmas curvy figure as she joined her pal for a
a good man. SULTRY temptress, 28, curvy figure, nice bum, WLTM George
the girls in their lives. AS a not-so- curvy gal, I was very keen to try out
Photograph) Telly debut axed in US. CURVY Kelly Brook shows off the charms
2001 </dt> Photograph) CURVY Kylie Minogue shows the stunning
year to see if readers preferred her curvy looks to Pamela Andersons thinner
17 August 1999 </dt> Photograph) CURVY Mariah Carey proves shes a real
Bill Clinton. Kerry, accompanied by a curvy redhead called Melanie, went on: `
in the world. Today its the turn of curvy Sarina Carruthers. SUN readers
with a few figures of his own-three curvy Scottish women. And flamboyant
06 April 1998 </dt> Photograph) CURVY Shanine Linton, 23, is learning how
the muscles that give you a firm, curvy shape. Think quality not quantity
cyst. Now she plans to use her curvy size six figure and 32c assets to
at the Great Yorkshire Show in 1997. CURVY television beauty Kelly Brook is in
t allowed to touch. Melissa is more curvy than me and looks a bit like I did
s 87 Signal Squadron are dril-led by curvy WOMAN sergeant major Vicky Hardy,
Curvy is used about women, objects of desire, who are measured, and identified by age,
name, hair colour and provenance. Its position immediately in front of an identifying
noun suggests a classificatory function. Where, in further data, curvy is used in other
contexts, it is typically used about cars:
side profile, nicely finished with a curvy and distinctive rear. Inside, it is
the inside, where the dashboard has curvy lines but is pleasantly
Theres a deep-raking windscreen, a curvy roofline, body-coloured door seals
104
But the dominant semantic preference for co-occurrence with female bodies makes these
appear sexualized. Compare too a caption for a Page 3 photograph in the Sun data, where
the female/car parallel is extended:
CAR fan Katie Richmond, 20, whips off her gear to show how she made her marque on Page
Three. With her curvy bodywork the sporty stunner, from Cheshire, really spoilers us.
In contrast, a same-sized sample from broadsheets:

fabric to give it a traditionally curvy and undulating form. Chanels lacy
 Jaguar XJS 3.2: 28,950 Cur vier and smoother in design than the
for its practicality. It is tall but curvy, and somewhat bigger than the boxy
everything that is voluptuous, curvy and tactile, and, more often than
oozes an earthy sensuality, has a curvy appeal and is just as happy eating
Certainly if you look at the curvy architecture of Future Systems, or
Lagerfeld unveiled a new version: the curvy, body-hugging 2005, a sleek,
would force me miles inland, over curvy, bumpy back-ways. But the scenery
Its quite graceful. I like the curvy design: I prefer it to a Range
activist Birgit Cunningham, 34, curvy, educated at Roedean and who
or Asian body or a thinner, less curvy European shape. So Anne, a 100 per
wear and there was the sexiest, curvy footwear seen on the catwalk this
who are considered to be too curvy for their own good. This is just
the Chasm chair, left. Its a low, curvy, friendly looking thing whose
have hit it big with their slinky, curvy furniture and clean, simple
to its architecture, idiosyncratic curvy furniture and utilitarian street
Ive noticed that its always the curvier girls that men want to talk to, so
behind a faux wardrobe door is a curvy grey marble ocean-liner bathroom
in is a good idea. If you are curvy-hipped, or are sensitive about your
the silk rustle. Gallianos signature curvy jackets and wide-legged trousers
The interior is a similar mix of curvy lines and triangles, and the
end of the range is the Mondo, a curvy little screen that fulfils almost
the sheer practicality of wrapping curvy new apartments around a curvy
pcs, now available in matte black, curvy purples, greens. As with 1950s
clothes pin-sharp frock coats, curvy quilted jackets, poncho dresses
Socrates, Burns and Lenin, the curvy, resin duo pose the question: What
like a furniture shop, but of the curvy, smart, Casino and design shops of
It is flexible and can be cut in curvy styles. If successful, the company
off the collection with knee-length curvy suits which shape the hip and bust
could write in celebration of being curvy they said it was too
Curvy is still used in relation to womens bodies, but far more often used about
shape and design. Here, objects of desire are material objects: cars, buildings, clothing, home furnishings, and so on. The Sun data for curvy suggests that women are
treated lexically as commodities (and cars anthropomorphized as women); but
equally we could argue that the broadsheet data suggests that commodities are
105
equated with people, aestheticized accordingly, and displacing sexuality an importantly different set of values.
Hunky
Hunky could be considered a male counterpart of curvy, rather like other gendered pairings such as pretty/handsome and slender/lean. A small randomized sample from The
Sun shows that hunky is used in a similar way to curvy, as premodifier of a male who is
named and/or identified in terms of occupation, role or attributes (though much less often
measured). From collocational profiles, typical occupations associated with hunkiness
include: (pop)star, actor, singer, dancer, model, fireman/firefighter, mechanic, gardener, etc., that is occupations particularly associated with physical display and the public domain on the one hand, and with physical skills, body strength and in some cases
danger and dirt on the other in other words, with stereotyped masculinity:
Nicole Appletons sexy clinches with
to Canada the actor who returned was
</bl> <dt> 24 March 1999 </dt> <subh>
</bl> <dt> 07 November 1999 </dt>
Lee Miller, while Nicole was with her
<dt> 03 September 2001 </dt> 
The Devil You Know backed by six
ER fans may be mourning the loss of
walk her up the aisle as she weds
E is for EDINBURGH. Thats where
The special effects are amazing.
Jo Guest AND getting paid for it. The
Kidman partied in London with a
Duce, right) is his mum. The
for details). Steven, 30 who played
KATHY and Rachel discover that
Scotlands national stadium. The
DANIEL HENNELL TO CLIFF TAYLOR,
an intimate clinch on a beach with a
put out a last-minute plea for more
to be lord of the dance on Ibiza! 
factory. The 24 year old used to date
massaged into her shoulders by
Brookside favourite John mcardle and
if you get the chance, get in there.
as a birthday treat but meeting
a rocking charity concert dash. The
even more spending power. And with
will be good for Scotland.
LOVER LIFTS LID ON BIZARRE SECRETS OF
hunky actor Peter Facinelli. The All

hunky Adam Rickitt. eastender Janine
HUNKY ADAM IS A FINE CATCH </subh> WORLD
HUNKY Adam Rickitt is so desperate for a
hunky American co-star Peter Facinelli.
HUNKY Andy Russell, 29, has quit his
hunky dancers. She said during
hunky Dr Ross, played by George Clooney,
hunky Dr David OHanlon played by Mario
hunky Dr Cameron Martin of the citys
HUNKY eastender Joe Absolom has stunned
hunky ex-Hearts midfielder has become the
hunky fella this weekend while hubby Tom
hunky firefighter has long suspected the
hunky fireman Greg Blake in the hit TV
hunky fireman Gez has been deceiving
hunky hitman had female fans in the 50,
Hunky husband, gorgeous smile, Many a
hunky internet tycoon. Donna Sands,
hunky Irishmen to attend. <hl> Limerick
HUNKY Keith Campbell lives a dream life
hunky male model Matt Bailey. But he
hunky Nellee, who used to date Kates
hunky newcomer Dominic West Cathy has
Hunky Paul, 25, told show bosses he once
hunky Pierce Brosnan was a view to a
hunky pop quartet drove crowds wild at
hunky Scott macdougall alongside to help
HUNKY Sean Lineen arrived here from his
HUNKY TV COP </subh> HARD-NUT TV cop Iain
106
The much smaller amount of evidence from the broadsheets is dominated by the item
hunky-dory, and other instances where the choice of hunky is partly associated with
rhyme. In other respects, there are similarities with the Sun data, but men are perhaps
more likely to be in the private domain or generalized, and less likely to be named:
a Paul Keating, puts her arm around a hunky Aussie Olympic swimmer and ushers
is not without shallows.Visnjics hunky blackmailer oozes melancholia
Lucy Blake. And she found her hunky boyfriend Dave after flirting
amount of interest.Yes. He holds Hunky-Bunky (the brown nylon rabbit) and
she couldnt believe her luck; a big hunky chap in her field all day and every
women do it, too, in this case with a hunky chippy, so there! It was reasonably
of a medium-sized Saxon burial mound, hunky, chunky, set with ribbons of
spice Tesco chunky vegetable 99p/450g Hunky, chunky, fun and funky Asda country
an image he is apt to exaggerate in hunky countries where men wear plaid
he is concerned, things are far from hunky-dory in the wards and corridors of
Castleford Tigers 22 It was another hunky-dory evening for Leeds, a fourth
ended. Initially, everything seemed hunky-dory. He was sure it was right for
even if the rest of the world looked hunky-dory. The benchmark Nikkei Stock
recording a session for David Bowies Hunky Dory, then go home for tea with my
in Zurich, she said. Everything is hunky dory. <subh> Centre of attention,
everybody else that everything was hunky dory, that was all. The
was announced. Everything was hunky-dory at The Dell thanks to the
sport should be, with the glamour and hunky drivers. It is about aspiration
s Eye cod fillets, for which the hunky frozen fish strip and strut on
 Looks like Colin Farrell, the hunky Hollywood heart-throb, may get his
her secret wedding in Moscow to hunky ice hockey star Sergei Fedorov as
out into the street trapped in the hunky male body she has created, with no
mum caught rather too often on other hunky male shoulders, a slightly built
respect, of course John Finch as hunky Marti Pellow circa 1992 doing
are also absolutely beautiful not hunky, or rugged, or conventionally
between a younger Miss Havisham and a hunky Pip, says Snodin. Depressed people
16 January 2000 </dt> Now I know what hunky punks are: not large chaps with
her pecker up by smooching with the hunky Swedish model Marcus Schenkenberg
hes got shorter hair. Hes a lot hunkier than before. The girls want to
handsome in that overrated, hunky, Tom Cruise sort of way. He is
Kinky
In our original study of kinky, we found some marked distinctions between The Sun and
the broadsheets. For example, in the Sun data, kinky as premodifier was associated with
men (the exception being a female murderer). Kinkiness in women was indicated through
metonymy, in particular their clothing and boots, which represented their participation in
sexual activity. This gender marking did not appear in the broadsheet data; and where
kinky was used to describe clothing and boots, it was associated more with identification
of fashion items, or simply connoted sexuality, rather than being metonymic. Hence, the
107
wearing of kinky boots in the broadsheets referred to sartorial choice, whereas in the Sun
data, it indicated sexual behaviour. In both sources, however, 40 percent of occurrences
were in relation to activities, especially in the collocations kinky sex and kinky games; the
Sun data also had kinky romps and spanking sessions.
Distinctions were less marked in the updated BoE, where data also includes a number
of uses as names or in titles. However, The Sun still shows some tendency for kinky to be
applied as an adjective to men rather than women; women, in contrast, are featured in
kinky photos, poses and sex participants but not necessarily instigators. Collocates not
shown in the following randomized sample include boots, rubber, black, leather, toys;
client(s), people, couple; torture, spanking, games, goings-on:
success: There is nothing smart or
shoes to bed as I think its quite
June 2001 </dt> Girls in tears at
two minutes into stoppage time, a
cap. <hl> City net 5m in
Downs. Not the usual drill for a
tomorrow. <hl> Jewell to go camp n
and I realised I was a little bit
could be just minutes away. <hl>
Boston Globe says. <hl> Cuff luck for
stores and some schools. <hl> Beeb in
after being lured into posing for
black nail varnish. Granted, those
showing mum-of-two Kerry Kirby in
be seen dishing out punishment to
August 1999 </dt> <subh> She tells of
were many chances before or after
rejected then granted on appeal.
04 May 1998 </dt> 6hr naked romp in
early hours to say he wanted them for
to do my best. <hl> Web lover cast
But experts have warned that
in bed </subh> 0660 100 481 Whats
his wife Pauline </subh> after their
a besotted 14-year-old fan into
Turkey and dumped the two men. <hl>
tying him up. These fantasies sounded
Calls cost 60p per minute. <hl> His
office, it was revealed last night.
he was gentle. Ive read that he was
kinky about my jokes. They are meant for

kinky. And I wore the dress while we were
kinky claims TWO boys have been
Kinky cross was met by Malcolm Christie
Kinky deal; Football </hl> <bl> Neil
kinky dentist. DO you have a story for
kinky; Football </hl> <bl> Michael Morgan
kinky. I went to a professional
Kinky line in kisses for an e-mail cheat;
kinky lovers </hl> <dt> 29 July 1999
kinky photo shocker </hl> <bl> Neil Syson
kinky photos. Many are now married with
kinky pinkies did belong to Sarita Riley,
kinky poses wearing suspenders and a
kinky punters in leather bondage gear as
kinky romps </subh> TRAGIC rock idol
Kinkys arrival on the scene. The best of
Kinky said: I would love to make my
kinky sauna . . . then he climbed into
kinky sex. Several of the calls
kinky sex spell;Ruth the Truth </hl> <bl>
kinky sex is only OK if you BOTH want it.
kinky sex and whats OK? <subh> 0660 100
kinky sex games with married neighbours
kinky sex sessions. A jury of eight men
Kinky talks cash at Ajax; Football </hl>
kinky to me although he swears he doesnt
kinky urges; Dear Jane </hl> <bl> Jane
Kinky videos and magazines belonging to
kinky with past girlfriends but Andy was
In the broadsheets, there is still some tendency for kinky to be applied more generally and
allusively to a mode of behaviour, rather than actual events, and for kinky boots to refer
to fashion or connote sexuality. Collocates not shown in the following sample include
108
many referring to sexual desire and behaviour (abusive, climaxes, craving, creepy, dominatrix, fantasies, lashing, outrageous, prurient, quirks, sadistic):
the foyer, where the Mexican funk of Kinkyand the Cuban congas of Anga Diaz,
as an ivory silk backless gown and kinky boots. Anyway, in she comes and
and plug it for all its worth. Kinky boots turned out to have a fair old
Keeler (who launched a thousand kinky boots), Julie Christie (peroxide
jumper, there is no trace of the kinky-boots image she sometimes espouses
mcqueens spring/summer dance of the kinky bull collection is inspired by
said: Hes always been a bit kinky but hes slowly improving and is a
Books </hl> <subh> Audio: Hideous Kinky, by Esther Freud (CSA Telltapes, 8.
which resulted in a fairly typical Kinky Canon tabloid article, would
John Napiers set has the right kinky-dungeon atmosphere. As Buridan, the
deal of eroticism and often rather kinky eroticism. There is lyrical
time you cried? Throughout Hideous Kinky, especially when the kids ask her
like a 50-year-old off to a slightly kinky fancy dress party, but he is
1999 </dt> SPANKING WATSON. By KinkyFriedman. Faber, 5.99 (Fiction).
blond children, Hans Massaquoi the kinky-haired, coffee-coloured son of a
the small-scale fun of Hideous Kinky is a relief for Kate Winslet.
<hl> Music </hl> <subh> Glorious Kinky: It is ten years since Suede
strife-torn sisterly duet. 4. Hideous Kinky Kate Winslet sweats it out in
Film of the week </hl> <subh> Hideous kinky: Love and Kate: Derek Malcolm sees
erotic about it. Im sounding very kinky now, she adds, laughing, but
of the Scholl-style mule with a kinky patent leather upper and wooden
and Meg Matthews. Hideous? Yes. Kinky? Please! Im afraid it takes more
of Japanese businessmen. Theres the kinky sadistic thug who gets her to stand
MORGAN </bl> <date> 19990605 </date> KINKY SEX # patsys The Isle of Wight is
Jang Sun Woo, adds a lashing of kinky sex to the week with his docucop, desperate to crack a pair of kinky-sex murders, and drawn into a world
of how love, lust, obsession and kinky sex inspired so much surrealist art
sex becomes boring after a while, kinky sex now becomes a subject of
film pretends to be shocked at its kinky sexual revelations while enjoying
said Eurostar hadnt seen anything so kinky since two masochists locked
Further adjectives
Investigations of other sexuality adjectives similarly revealed important distinctions
between Sun and broadsheet usage. For reasons of space, these cannot be discussed in
any depth, but general patterns may be observed simply by comparing the kinds of noun
collocate which these adjectives premodify in the two data sets. For example, naughty in
the Sun data is most likely to refer to some aspect of sexual behaviour, not necessarily
deviant; in the broadsheets, it may refer to sexuality, or to mischievous children, or
(sometimes self-referentially) to adults who admit or are accused of behaving in a mildly
dishonest way.
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Saucy in The Sun is used markedly about women (babe, blonde), especially when on
display (snap(s), pictures, shots, photo(s), calendar) or semi-clothed (undies, underwear,
lingerie). Other collocates include ones referring to entertainment (comedy, jokes, show,
scene(s)), and notably ones indicating pleasure (enjoy, hilariously, frolicked). Dominant
collocates in the broadsheets include seaside and postcard(s); items such as fiction, photos,
picture, double entendres, smile, harmless, knickers also appear. Yet contexts point to the
sauciness of a world observed or alluded to, but not participated in rather as with kinky.
Noun collocates of steamy in the Sun data very clearly refer to sexual activity and
relationships: sex, affair, clinch, fling, love, night, romp(s), scene(s), antics, romance,
encounter, kiss, or at one remove, drama, movie, show, thriller. Predictably, broadsheet
collocates include references to hot places and weather (heat, night, conditions, jungle(s),
windows, summer, day, basement, swamps, temperature), to works of art (novel(s),
blockbuster, saga) where sex is an important component, and to passionate encounters
(sex, affair, romance).
Finally, sexy itself: a much more frequent word than others discussed here. In The
Sun, it typically premodifies words referring to women (woman/women, girl/girls,
actress, female, blonde, beauty) and what they are wearing (undies, underwear, lingerie),
less often men or people identified through role (star, singer, model, footballer). As with
previous words, these collocates were identified as statistically significant through
T-score (see note 6); if Mutual Information is used instead, more marked items are foregrounded, including seducers, songstress, pout, backless, cyberbabe, lapdancer, cowgirl,
silicone, curves, pics, etc., further defining the concept of sexiness in The Sun. T-score
noun collocates in the broadsheets include references to people (man, woman/women,
girl/girls, boy) and underwear. Mutual Information collocates include a more extensive
range of clothing (lingerie, trouser, outfits, dresses, gear, leather), as well as an extensive range of adjective collocates (sassy, sensual, stylish, cool, funny, dangerous, beautiful,
feminine, subtle, alive). Contrasts between the two data sets here can be seen as further
evidence of contrasts between a discourse world where sexiness is associated with overt
display, and one where it is implicit or allusive: again, something reflective of sets of
values, and also something directly relevant to issues of gender and representation, and
the substance of Study 2.
Study 2: Adjectives, gender and categorization

Our second study also centred on adjectives, though here our primary concerns were
gender and differences between ways in which tabloids and broadsheets categorize male
and female participants in reports or features. There are many ways of exploring such
categorization or labelling, but we deliberately kept our own approach simple, focusing
on adjectival premodification of the gendered nouns man, woman and girl (since girl is
used to designate young female adults); the updated study, reported here, added boy for
the sake of completeness. Because we were interested in the categorization of social
actors and its ideological implications, we looked only at singular forms. Their comparative frequencies per million words of Sun and broadsheet subcorpora in BoE are shown
in Table 2.
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Table 2. Frequencies of man/woman/girl/boy in The Sun and broadsheet
subcorpora

man
woman
girl
boy
The Sun
Broadsheets
941.2
264.7
312.0
223.4
591.8
204.5
100.9
111.5
As in Study 1, we are looking here at around 45 million words of tabloid data and around
112 million words from broadsheets. Other corpus studies of gendered nouns have of
course appeared: of these, perhaps the most relevant for comparison with ours are those
by Caldas-Coulthard (1995; also 1993), who explores the concept of accessed voice by
examining occurrences in BoE of instances where men and women are being reported as
speakers; Pearce (2008), who explores collocates of the lemmas man/men and woman/
women in the 100 million word British National Corpus (BNC); Sigley and Holmes
(2002; also Holmes and Sigley, 2001), who look at patterns of usage of girl(s) and boy(s)
in five 1 million word corpora of American, British, and New Zealand English, including
changes in usage over time; and Baker (forthcoming), whose diachronic study of four 1
million word corpora draws attention to changes between 1931 and 2006 in the usage of
gender-marked language, including adjectives co-occurring with the lemmas man/men
and woman/women.
Noun phrases of the kind we investigated (PREMODIFIER+NOUN) seem particularly prevalent in journalism.7 They are an economical way of packaging information,
representing what writers consider relevant and interesting, as well as reflecting values and stereotypes consistent with the publications ideology. Kress and Hodge, for
example, point out the way in which noun phrases like these incorporate mini-narratives (1979: 109), while Conboy comments that noun phrase compression in tabloids connects with Halls notion of reductive scripts, and that such scripts and their
meanings consciously or unconsciously predispose the reader to a particular range of
interpretations of the information before them (2006: 26). As we know, linguistic
categorization is an instrument of control in two directions it is control over the flux
of experience of physical and social reality and societys control over conceptions
of that reality (Kress and Hodge, 1979: 63). It therefore seemed important to look at
the choices language offers us to refer to people, since every choice has an ideological
implication.
Van Leeuwen (1996) suggests, in his discussion of how social practices are transformed into discourses, that there is an array of choices or a system network, one that
is socio-semantically structured, from which we choose in categorizing or naming other
social actors and representing them in text. To start with, people can be included in or
excluded from discourses. Van Leeuwen distinguishes three major categories of categorization. One is functionalization, defining peoples identity in terms of an activity, in terms
of something [people] do, for instance an occupation or role (Van Leeuwen, 1996: 54).
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Table 3. Categorization schema, following Van Leeuwen
Functionalization
occupation, role, function
Identification

classification

relational

physical

personal
Appraisement
age, gender, provenance, race, ethnicity, sexuality,

class, wealth, religion, politics, etc.
kinship, work relationship, personal relationship
size, colouring, appearance, clothing, etc.
attractiveness
emotional state, behavioural traits, intellect, morality, etc.
general evaluatives and affectives
The other is identification, categorizing people not in terms of what they do, but in
terms of what they, more or less permanently, or unavoidably, are (Van Leeuwen, 1996:
54). He then distinguishes three types of identification: classification, relational
identification and physical identification. In the case of classification, people are
defined in terms of the major categories by means of which a given society or institution
differentiates between classes of people (Van Leeuwen, 1996: 54) in other words, what
we are: our age, gender, provenance, class, ethnicity, sexual orientation and so on.
Relational identification categorizes peoples relations to each other (e.g. kinship,
work, friendship, connections). Finally, physical identification has to do with physical
characteristics. The last category, appraisement, has to do with the ways social actors are
evaluated in discourse.
Applying this system network to our data proved very interesting. Our supposition
is that items collocating with man/woman/girl/boy are likely to be revealing of societal and sociolectal attitudes. For premodifiers, it is characterization and appraisal
or categorization/appraisement in Van Leeuwens typology which are particularly
prominent in our data, along with a further subset of adjectives which, broadly, relate
to personality and behaviour. While many adjectives are inherently evaluative, we
separated out two subsets: those specifically evaluating appearance (attractive,
good-looking, sexy), and more general terms of appraisal (good, lovely, wonderful).
Table 3 sets out our adaptation of Van Leeuwens schema, with our modifications
italicized.8
A note on methodology
To explore the adjectives premodifying man/woman/girl/boy, we used the collocational
profiling tool in BoE: this displays the top 50 collocates, in descending order of either
frequency or statistical significance, for each syntagmatic position relative to the target
or node word. Appendix 2 gives sample profiles for our target items, organized according
to T-score. (For example, old is the most significant adjective occurring immediately
before man in the broadsheet data, in the most significant item occurring immediately
after it.) Because our target words were very high frequency, T-score tended to show
unmarked collocates, often themselves high frequency items; we therefore looked too at
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collocates identified through Mutual Information, which privileged lower frequency

words and so helped in showing range within our categories; see also note 6.
To explain how we set out our analyses in the following sections:
collocates premodifying man/woman/girl/boy occurring within three words to
the left are listed in order of significance and proximity to node words, beginning with T-score collocates, and then additional Mutual Information collocates,
which are italicized;
we list only collocates occurring more than twice; asterisked collocates occur just
three or four times;
some adjectives are polysemous and fit into more than one grouping; we list them
accordingly, and according to their position in the profiles, rather than taking
sense frequency into account;
in addition to adjectives, premodifiers listed include participials and noun-modifiers
as in married, (strong)-willed, (good)-looking, baby, and fixed combinations such
as family man, career woman, etc;
we omitted deictic adjectives from our analysis; also items such as dead, murdered, wanted, unconscious, homeless, average, ordinary, unnamed, which
seemed too general to be specifically relevant here.
Man
Man is by far the most frequent of our target words, and much more frequent in the Sun
data than the broadsheets. When premodified, most tokens refer to an individual male;
generic uses mainly occur in collocations such as early/prehistoric/Neanderthal man and
sometimes modern man. Adjectivals indicating occupation or role are typically part of
lexicalized or semi-lexicalized compounds:
The Sun
best man, big man, right-hand man, hard man, wide man, quiet man, extra man, forgotten man
broadsheets
best man, right-hand man, leading man, working man, straight man, holy man, big man
Noticeable here is The Suns labelling of men with a particular function in a team or
group (occasionally also found in the broadsheets):
striker Stephen Baxter. The big man is automatically suspended after his
off their best win of the season. Hard-man Brennan, who is the squad for
at Old Trafford for being the quiet man at the club. The Salford man is the
before half time. But forgotten man Michael Hughes cheered up the
Comparable NOUN+man formations include star man, midfield man, target man, action
man, front man, danger man, Sun man, and, in generic usage, white van man: job titles
such as security man, PR man also occur.
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Adjectives in our classification category are as follows, with little here meaning
powerless, ordinary:
The Sun
AGE old, -year-old, young, older, younger, elderly; oldest
PROVENANCE local
ETHNICITY black, white
CLASS, STATUS, WEALTH main, top, richest, little, poor, powerful, rich; wealthiest, wealthy*
broadsheets
AGE young, old, -year-old, younger, older, middle-aged, elderly; youngish
PROVENANCE local
ETHNICITY black, white
POLITICS IRA
ORIENTATION gay
CLASS, STATUS, WEALTH poor, richest, rich, little, powerful, top, main, wealthy, self-made
Thus, categorization according to age and status/power dominates in both sources. When
specific ages are given, there is a slight tendency for men so identified in The Sun to be
younger than in the broadsheets: the 10 most significant age-collocates in The Sun range
from 1950; in the broadsheets, 1865.
The range of items indicating relational identification is limited. Old indicates a husband or father, lonely indicates lack of partner or friends, and new/main occasionally
indicates a boyfriend:
The Sun
new, married, main, old, family man, ladies man; loneliest, lonely*
broadsheets
new, married, single, old, family man; widowed
Adjectives which identify according to physical attributes are as follows:

The Sun
SIZE big, wee, little; well-endowed, tallest, stocky*, smallest, tall
COLOURING dark/grey/etc.-haired
APPEARANCE/CLOTHING bearded, balding
ATTRACTIVENESS sexiest
OTHER fastest, fit (+ young); strongest, fittest*
broadsheets
SIZE big, little, fat, tall, small; thickset, shortish*, stocky, tallest, burly, shrivelled*, emaciated*, strapping* (+ young), skinny*
COLOURING white/grey/dark/etc.-haired; swarthy
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APPEARANCE/CLOTHING naked, bearded; m(o)ustachioed, tracksuited*, besuited*,

bespectacled, hirsute*, balding, clean-shaven*, muscular*
ATTRACTIVENESS good-looking, handsome; handsomest*, sexiest, dishy*, scruffy*
OTHER blind, sick; fittest, frail
Fit and strapping mainly occur in the sequence fit/strapping young man, marking
them as attributes of youth. Many adjectives denote inherently male characteristics:
stocky, burly, bearded, etc. The Sun here does not seem to prioritize physical appearance beyond size, strength or capacity. While the broadsheet profiles have a greater
range of adjectives, many are relatively infrequent and only retrieved through Mutual
Information statistics.
More interesting for man are adjectives which label according to other personal
characteristics, with dirty here meaning prurient, oversexed:
The Sun
EMOTIONS/BEHAVIOUR hard, happy, relieved, happiest, brave, wild, broken, quiet, hardworking, gentle, sad, kind; coolest, calmest, baddest, prouder*, kindest, contented, meanest,
busiest, proudest, bravest, unassuming*, compassionate, mild-mannered, suicidal, funniest,
manipulative*, charming*, generous*
INTELLECT deluded*, funniest, articulate*, rational*, disillusioned*, clever*
MORALITY good, dangerous, innocent, decent, dirty (+ old); baddest, honourable
OTHER talented
broadsheets
EMOTIONS/BEHAVIOUR big, hard, happy, angry, brave, private, quiet, gentle, sad, sensitive, hard-working, mild-mannered, warm, kind; stingiest*, angriest, rudest*, bravest, selfeffacing, humbler*, unassuming, contented, undemonstrative*, meanest*, gregarious,
talkative*, cantankerous*, spiteful*, grumpy, ebullient*, amiable*, restless, stubborn*, shy
INTELLECT intelligent; wittiest, cleverest, funniest, inarticulate*, deranged*, worldly*,
thoughtful*, naive (+ young)
MORALITY good, decent, honest, dirty (+ old); wickedest*, baddest, honourable
To the above might be added uses of new to mean reformed, egalitarian, post-feminist. It
is noticeable that so many of the T-score collocates are positive, qualities to be admired, and
this includes dirtiness and wildness in context as normalized masculine behaviours.
Broadsheet categorizing is more likely to indicate intellectual capacity than in the Sun data,
and slightly more likely to indicate morality or middle-class values: perhaps indicative of
sociolect or target readers. This can be related to Romaines findings in BNC that the adjective-attributes honest and intelligent were more strongly associated with men than women
(2000: 10910) something which BoE confirms for honest and partially for intelligent.
Our final category consists of general evaluatives:
The Sun
best, right, great, good, nice, ideal, lovely, lucky, wee, little, wonderful, poor, perfect, wrong,
better, grand (+ old); luckiest, nicest, unluckiest*, nicer
115
broadsheets
great, best, poor, right, good, nice, wrong, grand (+ old), little, pleasant; unluckiest, odious,
likeable
The affective diminutive little occurs in structures such as [h]orrible/sad/strange/etc. little

man. Apart from this, which is generally negative, other evaluatives are mainly positive.
Overall, although we found some distinctions between The Sun and the broadsheets, these
were less striking than the similarities. In labelling a man, the most prolific categorization
was in terms of age, status and behaviour; the positive evaluations outweighed the negative.
Woman
Woman is less frequent than girl in the Sun data. Professional is the only clear adjective
collocate in either subcorpus which refers to occupation, or functionalization in Van
Leeuwens terms; an item which we did not find in the profiles for man, it here indicates
a type of salaried career.9 However, some other premodifiers occur with woman, and
woman itself occurs as premodifier, in combinations which indicate a female in a particular job or role: for discussion of such terms, see Romaine (2000: 117ff) and Holmes
and Sigley (2001). We list the most significant of these in our data:
The Sun
professional; career woman; woman + editor, driver, readers, cop, judge, passenger, patient,
teacher, motorist, etc.
broadsheets
professional; career woman, cleaning woman, working woman; woman + driver, president,
prime minister, lawyer, police officer, judge, writer, player, member, etc.
Some sociolectal and demographic distinctions can be seen between the sets of occupations listed.
Adjectives in the classification category are as follows:
The Sun
AGE old, -year-old, young, older, elderly, younger, middle-aged, youngest, oldest, mature;
twenty-something
PROVENANCE local
ETHNICITY British, Irish, black, white, Libyan, American; Asian
RELIGION Muslim*
CLASS, STATUS, WEALTH richest, successful; wealthy*
broadsheets
AGE young, old, -year-old, elderly, older, younger, mature, oldest
PROVENANCE local
ETHNICITY, NATIONALITY British, black, American, white, French, German, Asian,
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Russian, (ethnic) Albanian; Malian, Aboriginal, Hispanic*, Malaysian, Vietnamese*

RELIGION Jewish
CLASS, STATUS, WEALTH powerful, leading, senior, famous, richest, top, wealthy, poor,
successful; wealthiest
As with man, adjectives indicating age are common. One interesting item is mature,
something of a euphemism, and as with professional, not a significant collocate of
man. The range of ages specified in -year-old is similar in The Sun (19101) and the
broadsheets (1891), though there is, as with man, a tendency for age-identified
women to be younger in The Sun. Statistically, the 10 most significant age-collocates
in The Sun range from 2142; in the broadsheets, 1960. The broadsheets have a
wider range of adjectives indicating ethnicity; similarly, and markedly, with adjectives
indicating status.
As with man, only a few items indicate relational identification:
The Sun
new, married, single; unmarried*, lone*
broadsheets
married, single, new, lone; unmarried
Occasionally, perfect woman indicates an ideal partner; old woman only rarely refers to
a wife or mother.
Adjectives which identify according to physical attributes are as follows, with real
indicating that a woman has a quintessentially feminine appearance:
The Sun
SIZE busty; overweight*, larger*
APPEARANCE/CLOTHING naked, nude, best/etc.-dressed; topless*, long/etc.-haired
ATTRACTIVENESS beautiful, pretty, sexiest, real, attractive, lovely/etc.-looking, gorgeous,
sexy, glamorous; desirable
OTHER pregnant, disabled, frail*, healthy; handicapped*, vulnerable*
broadsheets
SIZE fat, tall, tiny, small; petite*, flat-chested*, stout*, voluptuous*
COLOURING blonde, dark/grey/etc.-haired
APPEARANCE/CLOTHING naked, smartly/well/etc.-dressed; bare-breasted, topless, uniformed
ATTRACTIVENESS beautiful, pretty, attractive, good-looking, real, sexy, plain*; sexiest, alluring, glamorous*
OTHER pregnant, vulnerable*; menopausal, childless, mute*, deaf
While some adjectives denote clothing, others denote undress more so than with man.
Adjectives which label size and colouring are less evident in the Sun data than those
which comment on appearance: many adjectives signify sexuality, including the size
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collocate busty, and all evaluate positively. The broadsheet data is more mixed, though
here too most adjectives are positive and often sexualized: appearance is commented on
far more than with man. This correlates with the kinds of asymmetry detected in BNC by
Pearce amongst collocates of man/men and woman/women which refer to appearance
and sexuality (2008: 17ff).10
Adjectives which indicate other personal characteristics are also interesting:
The Sun
EMOTIONS/BEHAVIOUR terrified, brave, strong, distraught, suicidal, happiest, independent, warm*; ballsy, kindest*, courageous*, hysterical, distressed*
INTELLECT intelligent, naive; sophisticated*, crazed
MORALITY good; wicked*
OTHER talented*
broadsheets
EMOTIONS/BEHAVIOUR strong, independent, shy, ambitious, vibrant*; vivacious, bossy*,
unpretentious*, strong-willed*, distraught, insecure, feisty*, strong-minded*, troubled*,
brave*
INTELLECT intelligent, bright (+ young); literate*, articulate*, naive*, eccentric*, crazy*,
silly, sophisticated*
MORALITY good; virtuous, promiscuous*, respectable*
OTHER resourceful*
We have categorized independent as behavioural, but it could be considered a marker of

relationship; other items which are indeterminate between behaviour, role and relationship categories are new and modern, indicating a woman in the post-feminist era, and
the counterbalancing collocation little woman, indicating one who adopts a traditional
persona at home and within society.
Behaviourals designating emotions in the Sun data include distraught, suicidal, hysterical, terrified, distressed, which suggest stereotyped female reactions. Many of the
other behaviourals are positive, and items such as brave, strong, warm, kindest suggest
the idealized qualities of a mother figure. In comparison, the broadsheets have more collocates referring to intellect and morality (as with man), and more relating to behaviour
than emotions. Broadsheet adjectives such as strong, independent, ambitious, vibrant,
intelligent, resourceful and so on reflect a stereotypical female reader of the broadsheet
press, and arguably of The Guardian in particular.
Finally, evaluatives:
The Sun
wonderful, poor, lovely, ideal, perfect, remarkable, amazing, right; luckiest
broadsheets
poor, good, nice, extraordinary, remarkable, wonderful; mysterious*, lovely*
These are nearly all positive or sympathetic.
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Overall, there seem to be more distinctions between The Sun and the broadsheets than
was the case with man, but there are still many similarities. As with man, categorization
in terms of age, status and personality is important; but, unlike man, physical appearance
and entailed sexuality seem even more important.
An aside: Labelling and lonely hearts

The kinds of adjective listed above for woman and for girl in the following subsection are reminiscent of those occurring in personal ads. Shalom, for example, analysed the most frequent adjectives used in such ads with respect to the desired other
(1997: 194 and passim): those in ads placed by heterosexual men include attractive,
intelligent, slim, warm, pretty, independent, bright, young(er), beautiful, loving, sensual as labels for their ideal woman, of which only sensual fails to appear in the
profiles for woman and/or girl; adjectives in ads by gay women include attractive,
good-looking, lovely, which appear in our data, and sensitive, which appears in our
data for man/boy but not woman/girl.11 Thus, the adjectival representation of women
or an individual woman in the media seems broadly consistent with the kinds of
qualities which are desired in female partners by the men and women advertising in
Shaloms data. Interestingly, there is a less good match between our data and the
adjectives which Shalom finds in ads for men. We have tall, handsome, warm,
intelligent, honest, kind, wittiest (= her witty), all mainly in our broadsheet data;
also nice, younger, which occur in her ads by gay men. However, the other descriptors of desired male partners in her data professional, educated, attractive,
humorous, passionate, sincere, slim, aware, solvent are not significant enough as
collocates of man/boy to appear in our profiles. Is this because qualities desired in a
male partner are not those considered interesting or important enough to mention
routinely in the masculinized world of the media (at least in our data)? At any rate,
where such qualities do occur as collocates, albeit with lower statistical scores, it is
mainly in the broadsheet subcorpora, and so the desired male partner becomes
positioned as a stereotypical middle-class male, with the security and values which
that implies.
Girl
Girl is roughly three times as frequent in the The Sun as in the broadsheets, and corpus
evidence relates to both female children and young women: some collocates are irrespective of age (pretty, happy), some more limited, as in those relating to age or occupation.
Girl, like woman, occurs in many restricted collocations which indicate role, particularly
in the Sun data, and girl itself also occurs as premodifier:
The Sun
career girl, working girl; Page 3/Three girl, vice girl, glamour girl, TV girl, PR girl, Bond girl,
call girl, Wonderbra girl, cover girl, shop girl, police girl, weather girl, checkout girl, etc.; girl
+ band/s, group/s, fan/s, pupil/s, cop/s, soldier/s, etc.
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broadsheets
working girl; head girl, call girl, cover girl, Bond girl, ball girl, PR girl, school girl, servant
girl; girl Friday; girl + band/s, group/s, gang/s, pupil/s, fan/s, singer, etc.
Working girl is ambiguous, referring either to a prostitute (not necessarily young) or to a

younger woman who is employed. Many of the MODIFIER+girl combinations in the Sun
data indicate sexualized roles, some others imply it: for example, referring to a female
presenter of meteorological bulletins as a weather girl suggests a focus on physical
appearance. Career girl is not a significant collocation in the broadsheets, perhaps
because females with careers are more likely to be designated as women (or the acquisition of a career is considered a marker of graduation from girlhood to womanhood).
(Compare this with the discussion by Sigley and Holmes (2002: 149ff; see also Holmes
and Sigley, 2001) of the usage of girl to refer to women in subordinate positions in the
workplace.)
Adjectives in the classification category are as follows, with golden girl indicating a
woman preeminent in her field, typically sports:
The Sun
AGE little, -year/month/week-old, young, baby, teenage, wee, youngest, younger, older;
underage, eldest
PROVENANCE local, Essex
ETHNICITY, NATIONALITY Irish, British, French; Romanian*
RELIGION Muslim
CLASS, STATUS, WEALTH golden, rich
broadsheets
AGE -year/month/week-old, little, young, teenage, baby, big, adolescent, underage, pubescent; teen*, eldest*
PROVENANCE Essex, country, local, city; Cockney*
ETHNICITY, NATIONALITY American, white, British, black, English, Australian, Asian,
Swedish; Vietnamese, Romanian*, Jamaican*, Kurdish, Swedish
RELIGION Jewish, Catholic, Muslim
CLASS, STATUS, WEALTH golden, working/middle class, girl, posh
Little, wee and big indicate a childs age as well as size. Old girl as an affectionate term
for an elderly woman is also found, more commonly in the broadsheets than the Sun data.
Where specific ages are mentioned, The Sun has adult females up to 27, and the broadsheets up to 24, suggesting that girlhood is regarded as ending around the mid-twenties
perhaps along with the acquisition of a career, life partner and/or family; this also
applies where age is mentioned in apposition after girl. As with woman, features such as
provenance, ethnicity, nationality and religion seem of more interest in the broadsheets;
in most contexts, these girls are adults rather than minors.
Only a very few items indicate relational identification, with popular girl occasionally used as a euphemism for promiscuous:
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The Sun
new, single, popular
broadsheets
single, popular; unmarried*
Adjectives relating to physical characteristics are as follows, with big indicating height
and/or curvaceousness in post-adolescent females:
The Sun
SIZE little, big, wee; smallest
COLOURING blonde/dark/etc.-haired; blue/etc.-eyed
APPEARANCE/CLOTHING topless*
ATTRACTIVENESS beautiful, good-looking, pretty, gorgeous, sexy, stunning, attractive; prettiest, sexiest, glamorous*
OTHER healthy*; deaf*, sick*
broadsheets
SIZE little, big, small, wee, plump, slim*; gawky, anorexic*
COLOURING blonde, red/etc.-haired, brown/blue/etc.-eyed
APPEARANCE/CLOTHING naked; topless*, nude, scantily/etc.-clad
ATTRACTIVENESS beautiful, pretty, good-looking*, sexy*; prettiest, gorgeous
OTHER healthy, blind, vulnerable*
Many of The Suns adjectives signify (adult) sexuality and, as with woman, are all positive. Those in the broadsheets are more mixed, though often also imply sexuality. Almost
all adjectives in the appearance/clothing subcategory indicate states of undress not dissimilar to woman in this respect.
Adjectives which indicate other personal characteristics are as follows:
The Sun
EMOTIONS/BEHAVIOUR terrified, brave, fun-loving, bubbly, tough, happy, lively*, shy*,
loving*, sweet*, frightened*; homely* (= home-loving), strong-willed*, feisty*, gutsy*,
traumatised*, happiest
INTELLECT silly, stupid, funny, clever, bright; naive, intelligent
MORALITY bad, innocent, good, tearaway*; naughty*
broadsheets
EMOTIONS/BEHAVIOUR charming, tough, happy, bouncy, sweetest*, sweet*; bubbly, spirited, courageous*, shy
INTELLECT bright, funny, intelligent
MORALITY bad, good; naughty
OTHER autistic*
121
Fun-loving and naughty (briefly discussed in Study 1) are both used euphemistically to
refer to sexual behaviour. Overall, there is a much greater range of items in The Sun
here, though this is partly a consequence of girls far greater frequency, and as with
man and woman, most are positive. Many of the adjectives listed above seem markers
of youth: bubbly, lively, tearaway, bouncy, spunky, sparky, feisty, silly, naughty, and
also bright, reinforced through the recurrent collocation bright young (sometimes
ironic). Funny and clever, too, are a little more strongly associated with youth: compare witty and intelligent which are more strongly associated with older adults as are
attributes such as powerful, wealthy, rich and glamorous, markers of mature status in
the social world.
In our last category of general evaluatives, nearly all are again positives:
The Sun
little, lovely, poor, nice, wonderful, wee, lucky, right,
great, perfect; luckiest*, pleasant*
broadsheets
little, nice, poor, lovely, wee, darling, wonderful*;
tiresome*, annoying*, cute*
Overall, there are some collocational differences between The Sun and the broadsheets;
age, physical appearance and personality/behaviour are the most important categories,
along with group identification in the broadsheets, and there is a strong tendency for the
labelling of adult girls to indicate sexuality in some way. This tendency is present with
woman, though less marked, and ties in closely with Conboys discussions of the representation of women in the media, including descriptions in terms of physical appearance
and sexual appetite (2006: 127ff; also 2007: 120ff).
Boy
Boy is about twice as frequent in the Sun data as in the broadsheets, though still only
two-thirds as frequent as girl: in the broadsheets, boy and girl occur almost equally. Boy,
like girl, refers to young adults as well as children; however, youth, lad, guy and other
items here provide alternatives in a way that lass, gal etc. do not.12 Boy occurs in a large
number of compounds and restricted collocations which indicate role, occupation (often
menial),13 or involvement in activities (often marginalized or illegitimate), as well as in
titles and names. We list the most significant of these for interest, omitting principal boy,
which has female reference:
The Sun
old boy (= former pupil), wide boy, head boy, rent boy;
errand boy, whipping boy; boy band/s, boy wonder,
boy racer/s, boy wizard
122
broadsheets
old boy, whipping boy, wide boy; school boy, barrow
boy, rent boy, ball boy, altar boy, office boy, teddy
boy, beach boy; boy band/s, boy wonder, boy racer/s,
boy king, boy soldier/s, boy choristers, etc.
Adjectives in the classification category are as follows:

The Sun
AGE -year/month/week-old, little, baby, young, wee, teenage, big, small, younger, older,
youngest
PROVENANCE local
ETHNICITY, NATIONALITY Irish, British, Asian, black, white
RELIGION Jewish, Catholic*
POLITICS Tory
ORIENTATION batty boy* (= gay man)
CLASS, STATUS, WEALTH golden
broadsheets
AGE -year/month/day-old, little, young, small, teenage, baby, big, younger, older, adolescent,
elder, oldest, eldest; (pre-)teen
PROVENANCE local, country, Essex, city, Cockney*, Hollywood*, Californian*
ETHNICITY, NATIONALITY white, black, American, Asian, Cuban; Vietnamese
RELIGION Jewish
POLITICS Tory
CLASS, STATUS, WEALTH golden, working/middle-class, rich
Tory boy and batty boy are fixed combinations, popularized through TV situation comedies of the time. As with man/woman/girl, age is frequently mentioned; where specific
ages are given, these are usually under 18. There are a few more labels for provenance or
ethnicity in the broadsheets, but overall, with the exception of age, these categories do
not emerge strongly from the collocational profiles.
Relational identification is very limited, perhaps with an expectation that a boy will
be single (though probably not friendless or unpartnered). Toy boy and bachelor boy are
fixed combinations:
The Sun
RELATIONAL toy boy, bachelor boy, popular
broadsheets
RELATIONAL toy boy, lonely*
Comparatively few adjectives relate to physical characteristics, with blue-eyed boy

being a fixed combination (in British English: cf. fair-haired boy in American
English):
123
The Sun
SIZE little, wee, fat, big, small
COLOURING blond, blue/etc.eyed
ATTRACTIVENESS pretty, beautiful
OTHER sick; disabled*, healthy
broadsheets
SIZE little, big, fat; overgrown*, skinny
COLOURING blue/etc.-eyed, blond/dark/etc.-haired
APPEARANCE/CLOTHING barefoot*
ATTRACTIVENESS pretty, beautiful; sexy, handsome
In comparison with man, woman, girl, this is a very small set of items. We have included
pretty here, though when applied to post-adolescent males, it carries implications of
wimpishness, effeminacy or homosexuality, or is otherwise used offensively.
Adjectives which indicate other personal characteristics are as follows:
The Sun
EMOTIONS, BEHAVIOUR busy, strong, wild, brave, shy, bravest, rude*, happy, cheeky*;
well-behaved*
INTELLECT clever, silly, stupid; intelligent*, daft*, bright*
MORALITY bad, naughty, good, reformed*; innocent
OTHER autistic, talented; dyslexic*
broadsheets
EMOTIONS, BEHAVIOUR wild, rude, quiet, shy, romantic*, sensitive*, sad*; jittery*, disruptive*, well/etc.-mannered*, cheeky*, well-behaved*
INTELLECT clever, bright, silly*; neurotic*, stupid
MORALITY bad, good, naughty, delinquent*; twisted*
OTHER autistic; dyslexic*, gifted
Rude boy is mainly used with reference to Jamaican culture; we could also add here the
combination bully boy, often premodifying tactics, and from the broadsheets the much
less frequent roaring boy. This is again a comparatively small set of items, though often
reflecting stereotypes of young males (wild, cheeky, disruptive, autistic, delinquent);
similar stereotypes emerge from parallel profiles for lad strapping, skinny; autistic;
plucky, lively, cheeky, wayward, perky.
Our last category is general evaluatives:
The Sun
lucky, lovely, nice, dull, poor, tragic; smashing*
broadsheets
good, poor, nice, dull, lovely*, strange*, favourite*; cute*
124
To these could be added dear boy as a mannered or dated term of address; cf. laughing
boy in informal or pseudo-colloquial usage.
While some patterns emerge here from the profiles for boy, they are less rich or interesting than those emerging for man, woman, girl. This is partly because the very large
number of fixed combinations with boy which themselves are interesting crowd out
collocates other than mainly high frequency adjectives. A fuller picture of how young
men are categorized in the media would need to take into account lad, youth etc.; a fuller
picture of the overall labelling of men and women would need also to look at bloke, fellow, lady, lass . . . , as well as adjectives in other syntagmatic structures. This is beyond
the scope of the present article, but we would anticipate finding marked collocational
patterns to distinguish items, particularly in projection of attitude and of stereotypes of
gender, sexualization, age and behaviour; we would also anticipate finding further
patterns associated with men, women, girls, boys and other plural forms in media usage.
Concluding remarks
These two studies used corpus methodology in order to find hard evidence, at the start of
the third millennium, for ways in which people are categorized in the written media, and
thus the ways in which gender is construed, and sexualization and discrimination are
performed, through lexical labelling. With our hypothesis that such categorization has
social outcomes, our starting point at a descriptive lexical level pointed to the specific
world views that newspapers project to their readers. The linguistic differences in the
way people are categorized in hard and soft news are a reflection of the ways in which
women in general are discriminated against. Male categorization, especially in terms of
power, provide newspapers with the modes of discourse which already encode the attitudes of a powerful elite (Fowler, 1991: 23). And women, according to this research, are
far from being in powerful positions, since they are constantly judged in terms of social
and aesthetic esteem, especially, but not exclusively, in the tabloid press. While men are
evaluated in terms of their function and status in society, a woman is evaluated additionally in terms of her appearance and sexuality even more so in the case of a young
woman, whereas young men are evaluated in terms of their behaviour. The striking disproportion in the labelling of the two genders makes clear a difference which many
people do not reflect upon. Our findings also gave us insights into the contradictions of
the tabloids in terms of their ideological positionings girls, for example, are sexualized,
yet child abuse is condemned (cf. our brief discussion of naughty) and other insights
into distinctions between the descriptive practices of tabloids, with their more overt sexuality, and broadsheets, where this seems to be sublimated or distanced.
By pointing out the different usages of adjectives in tabloids and broadsheets, we
wanted to underline the far-reaching nature of the differences between the views of the
world prepared for tabloid readers and those offered to readers of the broadsheets. Also,
by pointing out the differences in the ways men and women are labelled in the press, we
wanted to show that newspapers handle women and men as different categories. To
ignore these asymmetries is to risk reinforcing the stereotypes; as Fowler (1991: 105)
says, it would be complacent to accept that the relationship between language and society is merely reflective. And finally, by pointing out the differential representation of the
125
genders in terms of categorization, we hoped to make readers aware of the discrimination

in practice to which women are still exposed daily. Ten years after our original study, our
points remain valid and the implications remain to be fully explored.
Simple corpus studies of the kind which we have presented here can be a preliminary
to further systematic explorations with other kinds of data. They open up possibilities of
new research and new approaches to research, on social issues such as age, ethnicity and
class, inclusion and exclusion. Our study, though it had text and lexis as its main focus,
was not simply a textual or lexical exercise, because it provided us with hard evidence of
ways of being and ways of labelling: how people are categorized and how categorization
does indeed produce social outcomes, including exclusion and discrimination, both negative and positive. And in this sense, our study is a critical study, since it raises critical
questions. Curvy, hunky, kinky are not just salacious labels of the tabloid press, nor are
old, tall, strong, pretty, wild simple descriptors of the objects of newspaper reporting.
Affording multiple interpretations, they point to specific social practices which are part
and parcel of representation the very stuff of critical analysis.14
Notes
1. The Bank of English corpus as used in these studies was created by COBUILD at the
University of Birmingham, and comprises around 450 million words (approximately 71
percent British English, 21 percent North American English, 8 percent Australian English),
mainly drawn from 1990s or early 2000s written sources but also including over 20 million
words of spoken interaction and 40 million words of transcribed radio broadcasts.
2. For convenience, we use The Sun to refer to data from both The Sun and its Sunday
stablemate, The News of the World, and broadsheets to refer to The Times, The Guardian and
The Independent, even though no longer published in broadsheet format.
3. Comments on skewing and comparative frequencies are based on arithmetical comparisons of
permillionages, or numbers of tokens (instances) per million words of corpus text, rather than
measures such as log-likelihood, etc.
4. Chubby Checker is an American singer-songwriter; Fab Four originally and typically refers
to the Beatles; Posh Spice is the nickname of Victoria Beckham, wife of the footballer David
Beckham, and formerly a singer with girl band, the Spice Girls.
5. Meaning by collocation is an abstraction at the syntagmatic level and is not directly concerned
with the conceptual or idea approach to the meaning of words. One of the meanings of night is
its collocability with dark, and of dark, of course, collocation with night (Firth, 1957: 196).
6. From the analysis point of view, T-score in BoE foregrounds typical phraseological patterning
and collocates (often unmarked words); Mutual Information foregrounds more unusual or
marked words as collocates, thus showing semantic range. However, Mutual Information
works best with high-frequency node words: where node words occur less than once or
twice per million, distinctions between T-score and Mutual Information collocates are less
clear-cut. For discussions of the methods and advantages of different systems of calculating
collocational significance statistics, see Church and Hanks (1990), Hunston (2002: 69ff) and
Baker (2006: 100ff).
7. Statistics presented in Biber et al. confirm the greater densities of nouns in a news genre,
along with high densities of descriptive and especially affiliative adjectives (1999: 235, 510ff
and passim).
126
8. This can be compared to the much more extensive development of Van Leeuwens system
adopted by Reisigl and Wodak (2001: 46ff) in analysing racist and antisemitic discourse, and
the delicate categorization of attribute and attitude set out in Martin and Roses discussion of
appraisal (2003: 22ff) and in Martin and White (2005); compare too the socio-psychological
categorization used by Pearce (2008) in categorizing collocates of man/men and woman/
women.
9. Romaine (2000: 109) comments that professional has different connotations when applied
to men and women; she also points out that when used of women, professional may be a
euphemism for prostitute, though this was not the case in our data.
10. In his diachronic corpus study of gender-marked terms, Baker (forthcoming) discusses
adjectives associated with the lemmas man/men and woman/women, commenting that
one stable way that women are represented across the four corpora [sc. 19312006] is to
do with desirability, though he also observes that men are starting to be referred to with
attractiveness words in the most recent corpus.
11. Shalom also lists similar, feminine, bi, which indicate preferred sexuality and predictably do
not feature in our data, and similar, masculine, non-scene, special in ads by gay men.
12. Sigley and Holmes observe that in their data Girl is three times more likely than boy to refer
to an adult (2002: 145).
13. Compare the comment by Holmes and Sigley (2001: 25960) that boy is used for lowstatus, entry-level occupations; also in Sigley and Holmes (2002: 149), that this contrasts
interestingly with boys, which may refer to successful or powerful males.
14. The authors would like to thank Paul Baker for his very helpful comments on our article; we
are also indebted to audiences at the oral presentations of this research for their contributions
to the ensuing discussions.
References
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Baker, P. (2006) Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum.
Baker, P. (forthcoming) Will Ms Ever Be as Frequent as Mr? A Corpus-based Comparison of
Gendered Terms across Four Diachronic Corpora of British English, Equinox: Gender and
Language.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. and Finegan, E. (1999) Longman Grammar of
Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.
Caldas-Coulthard, C.R. (1993) From Discourse Analysis to Critical Discourse Analysis: The
Differential Re-presentation of Women and Men Speaking in Written News, in J.M Sinclair,
M. Hoey and G. Fox (eds) Techniques of Description, pp. 196208. London: Routledge.
Caldas-Coulthard, C.R. (1995) Man in the News: The Misrepresentation of Women Speaking
in News-as-Narrative-Discourse, in S. Mills (ed.) Language and Gender: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives, pp. 22639. Harlow: Longman.
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Fowler, R. (1991) Language in the News. London: Routledge.
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Geis, M.L. (1982) The Language of Television Advertising. New York, NY: Academic Press.
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Continuum.
Martin, J.R. and White, P.R.R. (2005) The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English.
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Pearce, M. (2008) Investigating the Collocational Behaviour of MAN and WOMAN in the BNC
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Plag, I. (2003) Word-formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Antisemitism. London: Routledge.
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Shalom, C. (1997) That Great Supermarket of Desire: Attributes of the Desired Other in Personal
Advertisements, in K. Harvey and C. Shalom (eds) Language and Desire: Encoding Sex,
Romance, and Intimacy, pp. 186203. London: Routledge.
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128
Appendix 1. Comparative frequencies of adjectives in BoE (permillionages)

Adjective
The Sun
Broadsheets
Today
Magazines
amazing
ashamed
berserk
big
bizarre
bonkers
boozy
brave
brilliant
bungling
cheeky
chubby
classy
crackpot
crafty
curvy
cushy
daft
desperate
disappointing
disgusting
dishy
dozy
drunken
evil
fab
fabulous
fantastic
frustrating
heartbroken
hilarious
huge
hunky
incredible
jammy
jealous
jubilant
kinky
lucky
massive
miserable
naughty
paranormal
posh
raunchy
ready
115.2
15.9
5.3
1049.7
138.4
3.6
11.2
71.0
136.9
7.5
21.4
3.3
14.3
1.5
4.1
5.5
2.5
21.6
112.6
44.9
15.6
2.7
4.9
16.6
42.9
15.5
37.7
125.2
20.3
17.0
16.4
209.7
11.2
66.2
1.3
18.7
6.5
8.3
149.0
132.2
21.3
14.2
3.6
70.8
12.3
183.3
25.7
6.5
1.2
405.1
25.4
1.9
1.1
29.7
47.7
0.7
5.0
1.7
6.1
0.5
1.7
1.0
0.4
7.4
42.9
24.8
5.0
0.3
0.6
7.7
20.2
2.5
12.1
30.2
10.0
1.1
6.8
153.6
1.0
15.6
0.4
5.7
2.3
1.6
44.9
47.2
13.2
5.3
0.9
12.6
1.4
94.5
50.9
12.6
2.3
711.3
30.1
1.5
2.9
59.6
83.6
5.5
10.3
4.2
8.8
0.8
2.7
1.7
1.0
14.5
87.5
32.8
9.0
0.4
1.5
16.6
26.1
8.2
41.3
35.4
12.2
9.9
9.5
170.5
2.1
40.0
0.2
12.8
4.6
1.9
108.0
91.6
17.1
9.5
0.2
8.8
5.9
155.7
39.1
9.4
1.7
584.4
26.3
1.9
1.0
26.2
77.1
0.5
7.1
3.1
7.7
0.4
2.7
2.2
0.4
10.2
31.9
15.7
13.6
0.9
0.9
7.1
20.5
6.8
34.2
29.3
9.1
1.7
11.7
121.9
3.3
22.8
0.9
12.8
1.2
6.4
69.0
51.3
13.9
11.8
0.6
6.9
4.6
121.7
129

Appendix 1. (Continued)
Adjective
saucy
scoreless
sensational
sexy
shameful
shirty
skint
steamy
stunning
superb
tacky
teen(s)y-ween(s)y*
terrific
tipsy
unlucky
vile
vital
wee
woeful
The Sun
12.8
3.6
41.6
78.9
6.3
1.4
5.1
10.3
91.6
85.9
3.9
2.7
31.2
1.8
34.8
7.6
89.0
29.2
6.1
Broadsheets
2.0
0.9
7.0
17.7
3.9
0.3
1.0
2.4
16.9
25.0
3.9
1.6
11.4
0.6
8.5
4.5
51.4
5.2
2.2
Today
Magazines
4.8
0.6
22.7
43.8
4.2
1.1
1.1
8.8
47.6
56.4
4.8
0.8
21.5
1.3
17.7
5.3
83.1
4.4
1.3
3.1
0.0
9.9
59.3
2.9
0.5
0.9
4.5
33.7
51.4
6.1
3.7
14.4
0.8
7.6
3.4
56.7
9.0
0.7
Note: Figures represent permillionages: that is, occurrences per million words of corpus text.
* This includes teeny weeny, teensy weensy and teen(s)y and ween(s)y as independent forms.
130
Appendix 2. Sample T-score collocational profiles from BoE

adjective + man: The Sun
is
was
a
be
as
s
with
like
such
world
m
am
not
for
by
met
of
very
find
britain
the
a
year
an
very
most
this

his
s
my
injury
her
<subh>
suspended
another
dirty
suspension
bench
old
key
old
young
best
new
big
right
only
great
hard
dead
main
other
happy
top
good
last
richest
dangerous
own
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
in
who
and
he
s
was
for
but
at
to
i
with
is
on

paul
kevin
alive
lee
has
the
his
he
britain
has
i
arrested
have
earth
was
her
charge
europe
a
woman
phillips
ve
mystery
hughes
johnson
job
world
life
west
wedding
ever
</subh>
charlton
ipswich
his
planet
leeds
sunderland
newcastle
fulham
arsenal
sheff
barnsley
norwich
leicester
young
old
great
black
best
dead
new
white
poor
big
hard
only
gay
richest
right
rich
good
nice
younger
older
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
MAN
who
in
s
with
he
and
was
but
whose
i

from
has
at
had
called
on
made
for
walking
a
his
had
he
the
was
woman
has
europe
britain
an
shot
whom
been
is
charge
i
died
have
reception
his
world
he
job
reception
who
was
ever
a
very
him
himself
white
been
right
hair
wedding
not
sea
me
old
young
other
beautiful
older
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
who
in
and
was
she
her
she
a
has
julia
world
she
her
ever
life
adjective + man: broadsheets

a
as
was
is
of
an
be
with
not
by
s
like
for
am
such
world
being
m
become
when
a
the
an
year
very
most
this
grand
young
one
s
angry
old
another
tall
his
my
any
dirty
handsome
adjective + woman: The Sun

a
with
is
was
as
a
year
the
an
this
131

s
like
</dt>
of
m
met
an
from

world
24
27
such
am
21
most
very
one
any
beautiful
pretty
attractive
s
lovely
his
hendry
really
strong
heavily
frail
pretty
elderly
only
new
pregnant
sexiest
wonderful
poor
real
attractive
younger
lovely
dead
single
naked
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
i
s
but
with
died
on
is
has

he
alive
called
whose
star
had
was
had
ve
d
ever
the
i
killed
classy
britain
found
have
raped
been
looks
roberts
a
me
t
very
not
own
never
bedchamber
south
who
</subh>
arm
herself
arrested
young
old
only
black
pregnant
elderly
older
beautiful
white
other
single
whole
pretty
dead
naked
younger
new
poor
same
local
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
WOMAN
who
in
with
s
she
was
and
whose
from
i
is
but
called
has
on
had
died
whom
sitting
at
her
a
had
she
has
was
whom
herself
the
up
died
me
killed
in
ve
an
greer
have
found
britain
her
a
she
ever
world
who
herself
late
died
man
hair
been
t
doubleday
mother
woman
birth
early
hanged
child
little
old
young
teenage
golden
lovely
beautiful
new
other
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
who
and
she
was
s
in
but

is
she
her
was
i
had
a
blouse
has
me
her
she
was
world
m
ever
been
has
love
adjective + woman: broadsheets

a
of
with
as
an
was
is
for
by
like
about
book
25
22
30
35
being
year
intelligen
60
a
the
year
an
most
this
one
very
young
beautiful
old
every
another
first
any
attractive
pretty
naked
tall
sexually
adjective + girl: The Sun

a
was
such
14
with
12
13
15
16
a
year
the
my
an
this
very
most
our
(Continued)
132
is
17
</dt>
18
11
five
eight
s
19
of
met
month
lovely
your
her
beautiful
his
tv
<hl>
one
old
brave
innocent
poor
nice
single
local
big
wonderful
wee
pretty
gorgeous
bad
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
band
i
with
has
group
died
called
power
whose
had
asked
died
mum
met
pregnant
is
door
life
body
turner
herself
fighting
t
death
dad
life
had
ve
ago
am
who
sex
after
old
little
young
teenage
bad
beautiful
pretty
nice
golden
good
poor
local
big
white
single
dead
lovely
blonde
small
new
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
GIRL
who
in
with
she
s
and
was
from
called
i
died
whose
had
is
next
at
power
has
but
moment
her
a
was
had
she
door
died
found
me
killed
parents
blouse
raped
been
mother
wanted
herself
lived
girl
met
her
she
who
world
been
t
was
from
had
school
mother
boy
in
class
raped
life
herself
hair
just
girl
old
new
little
bad
golden
young
local
wee
teenage
fat
big
pretty
wide
naughty
eyed
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
who
was
and
band
s
slim
lost
has
image
mark
football

he
bands
in
his
was
died
he
</hl>
been
girl
killed
football
had
who
death
has
is
owen
his
was
has
is
who
<bl>
him
even
report
football
class
after
came
school
made
adjective + girl: broadsheets

a
12
15
was
16
as
11
14
of
13
eight
17
like
five
with
three
seven
six
four
nine
a
year
the
an
very
my
month
most
this
old
one
little
beautiful
her
every
poor
bright
nice
young
lovely
adjective + boy: The Sun

was
14
</dt>
15
a
nine
11
12
16
13
seven
six
s
as
four
a
year
the
my
month
very
blue
her
<hl>
s
another
one
an
lovely
your
133

five
like
ten
eight

soccer
his
5million
hearts
fellow
small
other
toy
lucky
clever
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
from
david
michael
chris
reputation
a
family
i
van
pivaro
mum
ever
from
scored
looks
old
little
young
bad
small
golden
new
teenage
suitable
pretty
big
local
fat
white
good
naughty
wide
dead
poor
dear
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
BOY
who
was
in
s
from
he
and
with
network
has
called
i
whose
band
died
is
slim
image
lost
made
his
a
was
had
girl
he
an
been
died
good
own
killed
up
used
found
shaw
door
death
being
me
his
school
who
he
a
was
blake
been
t
father
mother
him
after
seth
being
head
cottesloe
feather
arrested
charged
adjective + boy: broadsheets

14
was
as
13
15
12
16
nine
of
a
11
like
eight
six
four
10
seven
s
five
17
a
year
the
an
month
my
old
very
one
s
every
her
little
another
blue
this
famous
former
good
bright
Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard, formerly Professor of English Language and Applied

Linguistics at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, is now Senior Lecturer
at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests are in social semiotics and gender representation, visual communication and identity politics. Her publications include:
News as Social Practice (UFSC, Brazil, 1997), (with co-editor Malcolm Coulthard)
Texts and Practices: Reading in Critical Discourse Analysis (Routledge, 1996) and (with
Rick Iedema) Identity Trouble: Critical Discourse and Contested Identities (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2008).
Rosamund Moon is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of
Birmingham. Her main research areas are lexis and phraseology, figurative language,
lexicography and corpus linguistics. Her publications include Fixed Expressions and
Idioms in English: A Corpus-based Approach (Oxford University Press, 1998) and (with
Murray Knowles) Introducing Metaphor (Routledge, 2006).

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Discourse

'Curvy, hunky, kinky': Using corpora as tools for critical analysis

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Curvy, hunky, kinky: