Chapter published in:
Corpus Approaches to Social Media
Edited by Sofia Rüdiger and Daria Dayter
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 98] 2020
► pp. 63–86

Talking about women

Elicitation, manual tagging, and semantic tagging in a study of pick-up artists’ referential strategies

| University of Basel
| University of Bayreuth
In this chapter, we examine how pick-up artists (PUAs; a male community preoccupied with interacting with women) talk about women in their online discourse. To this end, we take and test three approaches: (1) introspection and elicitation, (2) manual tagging of a small specialized corpus, and (3) automatic semantic tagging and reverse collocation of a large corpus of PUA computer-mediated communication. Instead of misogynistic derogatory references to women, which are only used infrequently, we find that PUAs rely on common references (often condescending or objectifying) and on PUA-specific vocabulary. In terms of method, manual tagging turned out most comprehensive, but automatic semantic tagging allowed for the processing of a far bigger dataset with minimal loss of total types retrieved.
Keywords: automatic semantic tagging, corpus-based discourse analysis, PUA, references to women, vocabulary
Published online: 04 November 2020
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.98.03day
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