Cover not available
Part of
Corpus Approaches to Social Media
Edited by Sofia Rüdiger and Daria Dayter
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 98] 2020
► pp. 63–86

Chapter 3
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
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Discourse of pick-up artists through the linguistic lens
  • 3.Corpus-based research on reference in discourse
  • 4.Data: The online PUA corpora
    • 4.1Large e-PUA corpus
    • 4.2Field reports (FR) corpus
  • 5.Threefold method: Introspection, manual tagging, and automatic methods
    • Introspection and elicitation
    • Manual tagging
    • Automatic annotation
  • 6.PUAs speaking about women
    • 6.1Findings of the introspection and elicitation round
    • 6.2Findings of the manual tagging round
    • 6.3Additional findings of the semantic tagging and reverse collocation analysis
  • 7.Discussion and conclusion
    • 7.1Pick-up artists speaking about women
    • 7.2Summary of the three extraction methods
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 November 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.98.03day
References
Anthony, Laurence
2014 AntConc (3.4.4w) [software]. Tokyo: Waseda University. [URL] (23 March 2020).
Archer, Dawn, Wilson, Andrew & Rayson, Paul
2002 Introduction to the USAS category system. [URL] (24 January 2020).
Baker, Paul
2006 Using Corpora in Discourse Analysis. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
2009 The BE06 corpus of British English and recent language change. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 14(3): 312–337. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2010 Representations of Islam in British broadsheet and tabloid newspapers 1999–2005. Language and Politics 9(2): 310–338. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 Using Corpora to Analyze Gender. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Baker, Paul, Gabrielatos, Costas & McEnery, Tony
2013 Sketching Muslims: A corpus driven analysis of representations around the word ‘Muslim’ in the British press 1998–2009. Applied Linguistics 34(3): 255–278. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Berger, Cynthia, Friginal, Eric & Roberts, Jennifer
2017 Representations of immigrants and refugees in U.S. K-12 school-to-home correspondence: An exploratory corpus-assisted discourse study. Corpora 12(2): 153–179. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Connor, Ulla & Upton, Thomas
2007 Discourse on the Move – Using Corpus Analysis to Describe Discourse Structure [Studies in Corpus Linguistics 28]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brezina, Vaclav, McEnery, Tony & Wattam, Stephen
2015 Collocations in context: A new perspective on collocation networks. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 20(2): 139–173. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brezina, Vaclav, Timperley, Matt & McEnery, Tony
2018 #LancsBox v. 4.x [software]. [URL] (23 March 2020).
Burr, Vivien
1995 An Introduction to Social Constructionism. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Collins, Luke
2011 How can semantic annotation help us to analyse the discourse of climate change in online user comments. Linguistik Online 70(1): n.p. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dayter, Daria & Rüdiger, Sofia
2016 Reporting from the field: The narrative reconstruction of experience in pick-up artist online communities. Open Linguistics 1(2): 337–351.Google Scholar
2019 In other words: ‘The language of attraction’ used by pick-up artists. English Today 35(2): 13–19. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
De Klerk, Vivian
1992 How taboo are taboo words for girls? Language in Society 21: 277–289. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eckert, Penelope & McConnell-Ginet, Sally
1992 Think practically and look locally: Language and gender as community-based practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 21: 461–490. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2003 Language and Gender. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Flowerdew, Lynne
2013 Corpus-based discourse analysis. In The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis, James Paul Gee & Michael Handford (eds), 174–187. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Gee, James Paul
1999 An Introduction to Discourse Analysis – Theory and Method. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Gordon, David Paul
1983 Hospital slang for patients: Crocks, gomers, gorks, and others. Language in Society 12: 173–185. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Grazian, David
2007 The girl hunt: Urban nightlife and the performance of masculinity as collective identity. Symbolic Interaction 30(2): 221–243. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hall, Stuart
(ed.) 1997 Representation – Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices [Culture, Media and Identities 2]. London: Sage in Association with the Open University.Google Scholar
Harrison, Simon, Todd, Zazie & Lawton, Rebecca
2008 Talk about terrorism and the media: Communicating with the conduit metaphor. Communication, Culture and Critique 1(4): 378–395. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hartung, Matthias, Klinger, Roman, Schmidtke, Franziska & Vogel, Lars
2017 Identifying right-wing extremism in German Twitter profiles: A classification approach. In Natural Language Processing and Information Systems – 22nd International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems, Flavius Frasincar, Ashwin Ittoo, Le Minh Nguyen & Elisabeth Métais (eds), 320–325. Cham: Springer.Google Scholar
Heinrich, Philipp, Adrian, Christoph, Kalashnikova, Olena, Schäfer, Fabian & Evert, Stefan
2018 A transnational analysis of news and tweets about nuclear phase-out in the aftermath of the Fukushima incident. In Proceedings of the LREC 2018 “Workshop on Computational Impact Detection from Text Data”, 08 May 2018, Miyazaki, Japan, Andreas Witt, Jana Diesner & Georg Rehm (eds), 8–16.Google Scholar
Heinrich, Philipp & Schäfer, Fabian
2018 Extending corpus-based discourse analysis for exploring Japanese social media. In Proceedings of 4th Asia Pacific Corpus Linguistics Conference (APCLC2018), Yukio Tono & Hitoshi Isahara (eds), 135–140.Google Scholar
Herring, Susan C.
2004 Computer-mediated discourse analysis: An approach to researching online behavior. In Designing for Virtual Communities in the Service of Learning, Sasha A. Barab, Rob Kling & James H. Gray (eds), 338–376. New York NY: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ifukor, Presley
2010 “Elections” or “selections”? Blogging and twittering the Nigerian 2007 general elections. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 30(6): 398–414. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
KhosraviNik, Majid
2010 The representation of refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants in British newspapers. Journal of Language and Politics 9(1): 1–28. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kim, Kyung H.
2014 Examining US news media discourses about North Korea: A corpus-based critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society 25(2): 221–244. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koteyko, Nelya, Nerlich, Brigitte, Crawford, Paul & Wright, Nick
2008 “Not rocket science” or “no silver bullet”? Media and government discourses about MRSA and cleanliness. Applied Linguistics 29(2): 223–243. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lakoff, Robin
1973 Language and woman’s place. Language in Society 2(1): 45–80. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lave, Jean & Wenger, Étienne
1991 Situated Learning – Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leuckert, Sven
2020 Rethinking community in linguistics: Language and community in the Digital Age. In Rethinking Community through Transdisciplinary Research, Bettina Jansen (ed.), 111–125. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Love, Robbie & Baker, Paul
2015 The hate that dare not speak its name? Journal of Language Aggression and Conflict 3(1): 57–86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lutzky, Ursula & Lawson, Robert
2019 Gender politics and discourses of #mansplaining, #manspreading, and #manterruption on Twitter. Social Media + Society. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McArthur, Tom
1981 Longman Lexicon of Contemporary English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
McGlashan, Mark
2020 Collective identity and discourse practice in the followership of the Football Lads Alliance on Twitter. Discourse & Society 31(3): 307–328. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Potts, Amanda
2015 Filtering the flood: Semantic tagging as a method of identifying salient discourse topics in a large corpus of Hurricane Katrina reportage. In Corpora and Discourse Studies – Integrating Discourse and Corpora, Paul Baker & Tony McEnery (eds), 285–304. London: Palgrave MacMillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Prentice, Sheryl
2010 Using automated semantic tagging in critical discourse analysis: A case study on Scottish independence from a Scottish nationalist perspective. Discourse and Society 21(4): 405–437. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rayson, Paul, Archer, Dawn, Piao, Scott & McEnery, Tony
2004 The UCREL semantic analysis system. In Proceedings of the Beyond Named Entity Recognition Semantic Labelling for NLP Tasks Workshop, Lisbon, Portugal 2004, 7–12.Google Scholar
Rayson, Paul
2008 From key words to key semantic domains. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13(4): 519–549. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rüdiger, Sofia & Dayter, Daria
2017 The ethics of researching unlikeable subjects. Applied Linguistics Review 8(2–3): 251–269. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2020 Manbragging online: Self-praise on pick-up artists’ forums. Journal of Pragmatics 161: 16–27. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Shulman, Stuart
2011 DiscoverText: Software training to unlock the power of text. dg.o ’11: Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Digital Government Research Conference: Digital Government Innovation in Challenging Times, June 2011, 373. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sigley, Robert & Holmes, Janet
2002 Looking at girls in corpora of English. Journal of English Linguistics 30(2): 138–157. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stommel, Wyke
2008 Conversation analysis and Community of Practice as approaches to studying online community. Language@Internet 5: n.p. [URL] (1 November 2019).
Taboada, Maite
2016 Sentiment analysis: An overview from linguistics. Annual Review of Linguistics 2: 325–347. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Charlotte
2014 Investigating the representation of migrants in the UK and Italian press: A cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse analysis. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 19(3): 368–400. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taylor, Charlotte & Marchi, Anna
(eds) 2018 Corpus Approaches to Discourse – A Critical Review. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
TextSTAT
2020 Simple Text Analysis Tool. [URL] (22 February 2020).
Van Leeuwen, Theo
1996 The representation of social actors. In Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard & Malcolm Coulthard (eds), 32–70. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Weatherall, Ann
1998 Women and men in language: An analysis of seminaturalistic person descriptions. Human Communication Research 25(2): 275–292. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 1 other publications

Lawson, Robert
2023. Language and Mediated Masculinities, DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 2 december 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.