Becoming a Woman, Linguistically: A corpus-based analysis of Norwegian age constructions with lexemes denoting unnamed persons

Abstract

This thesis investigates the use of seven Norwegian lexemes to refer to unnamed persons in age-specified constructions in Norwegian newspapers. The study combines corpus analysis with critical discourse analysis from a feminist perspective. The corpus analysis consists of a descriptive statistical analysis of Norwegian age constructions combined with the lexemes KVINNE (‘woman’), DAME (‘lady’), KONE (‘wife’), MANN (‘man’), JENTE (‘girl’), GUTT (‘boy’) and BARN (‘child’) in the Norwegian Newspaper Corpus (bokmål) to provide the distribution of ages represented by the lexemes and compare them with Norwegian average puberty ages and the Norwegian age of majority. The descriptive analysis shows that the use of JENTE and GUTT includes more representation of ages over the age of majority compared to the ages represented by the use of BARN. The distribution of ages represented by KVINNE and MANN are similar. The age distribution of DAME has a higher representation of relatively older age compared to KVINNE and KONE. The critical discourse analysis compares the results of the corpus analysis with the dictionary entries for the focus lexemes in two Norwegian bokmål dictionaries and uses feminist perspectives to discuss and identify themes of gender discourse. The analysis identifies themes of the male default, infantilization of women, women as objects of desire, and traditional gender roles present in the Norwegian language. The thesis concludes that there is more overlap in age span between the female focus lexemes than between the male focus lexemes, that journalists tend to switch from using barn to using jente and gutt during the ages of puberty, and that DAME tends to denote older women despite old age not being a component of any of its dictionary definitions.