Do sex and gender go hand in hand? A study of their collocational profiles in EU documents regarding equal treatment of men and women
Katarzyna Mroczyńska
University of Siedlce, PolandKatarzyna Mroczyńska is a linguist with a background in economics, with her main research interest b ing collocations and the legal English genre. Other academic interests include translation of specialist texts, recent developments in computer-assisted translation and machine translation, borrowings in Polish specialist language, the role of metaphors in Business English, neurolinguistics, and the application of cognitive field theory in foreign language teaching and learning.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0367-1056
Abstract
The study of collocations has a long history that goes back to Firth (1957/1968). However, scholarly attention has focused mostly on collocations in general language, with research on this phenomenon within Language for Specialised Purposes (LSP) being a newer and not thoroughly explored line of research. The present article attempts to bridge this gap by looking at the way sex and gender are employed in the European Union legislation and documents regarding equal treatment of men and women. In particular, the study contrasts and analyses the combinatory potential of sex and gender as employed in the equal opportunities and non-discrimination regulations and other documents issued by the European Union and its bodies. It also offers a diachronic perspective on how sex and gender are used in the EU’s primary and secondary legislation as well as in guidelines and recommendations. The findings suggest that the two terms in question show completely different collocational profiles and their combinatory potential also varies, with sex appearing in a limited number of well-established collocations and gender being far more productive and frequent, especially in more recent documents.
Schlagworte:
corpus studies, equal opportunities, legal English, gender, sex, EU regulationsLiteraturhinweise
Allport, G. W. (1979). The nature of prejudice: 25th anniversary edition. Basic Books.
Baker, P. (2006). Using corpora in discourse analysis. Continuum.
Bergenholtz, H. & Tarp, S. (1994). Mehrworttermini und Kollokationen in Fachwörterbüchern. In B. Schaeder & H. Bergenholtz (Eds.), Fachlexikographie: Fachwissen und seine Repräsentation in Wörterbüchern (pp. 385–419). Gunter Narr Verlag.
Biel, Ł. (2012). Areas of similarity and difference in legal phraseology: collocations of key terms in UK and Polish company law. In A. Pamies, J. M. Pazos Bretaña & L. Luque Nadal (Eds.), Phraseology and discourse: Cross linguistic and corpus-based approaches (pp. 225–233). Schneider Verlag.
Biel, Ł. (2014). Phraseology in legal translation: a Corpus-based analysis of textual mapping in EU law. In L. Cheng, K. Kui Sin & A. Wagner (Eds.), Ashgate handbook of legal translation (pp. 178-192). Ashgate Publishing.
Bilz, K. & Nadler, J. (2014). Law, moral attitudes and behavioural change. In E. Zamir & D. Teichman (Eds.), Oxford handbook of behavioural economics and the law (pp. 241–267). Oxford University Press.
Bogetić, K. (2013). Normal straight gays: Lexical collocations and ideologies of masculinity in personal ads of Serbian gay teenagers. Gender & Language, 7(3), 333–367.
Brief for Amici Curiae Corpus-Linguistics Scholars Professors Brian Slocum, Stefan Th. Gries, and Lawrence Solan supporting employees, Bostock v. Clayton County, Altitude Express v. Zarda & Moore, and Harris Funeral Homes v. EEOC. (2019).
Buzmaniuk, S. (2023). Gender equality in Europe: a still imperfect model in the world. European Issues, 659, 1–7. Foundation Robert Schuman Policy Paper.
Corbett, G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge University Press.
Cowie, A. (1994). Phraseology. In R.E. Asher & J.M.Y. Simpson (Eds.), The encyclopedia of language and linguistics (pp. 3168–3169). Pergamon Press.
Cruse, D. A. (1986). Lexical semantics. Cambridge University Press.
Cruse, D. A. (2000). Meaning in language: An introduction to semantics and pragmatics. Oxford University Press.
Crystal, D. (2003). A dictionary of linguistics and phonetics (5th edition). Blackwell Publishing.
Evert, S. (2008). Corpora and collocations. In A. Lüdeling & M. Kytö (Eds.), Corpus linguistics. An international handbook (pp. 1212–1248). De Gruyter.
Firth, J. R. (1957/1968). A synopsis of linguistic theory, 1930–1955. In F.R. Palmer (1968) (Ed.), Selected Papers of J.R. Firth 1952–1959 (pp. 168–205). Indiana University Press.
Garner, B. A. (2019). Editor in chief. Black’s dictionary of law (11th edition). Thomson West.
Gonzalez-Ray, I. (2002). La phraséologie du français. Presses Universitaires du Mirail.
Goźdź-Roszkowski, S. (2011). Patterns of linguistic variation in American legal English: A corpus-based study. Peter Lang.
Goźdź-Roszkowski, S. (2013). Exploring near-synonymous terms in legal language. A corpus-based, phraseological perspective. Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies, 12, 94–109.
Goźdź-Roszkowski, S., & Pontrandolfo, G. (Eds.). (2017). Phraseology in legal and institutional settings: a corpus-based interdisciplinary perspective. Routledge.
Halberstam, J. (2014). Gender. In B. Burgett & G. Hendler (Eds.), Keywords for American Cultural Studies (2nd edition, pp. 116–18). NYU Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1287j69.33.
Hausmann, F. J. (1989). Le dictionnaire de collocations. In F. J. Hausmann, O. Reichmann, H. E. Wiegand & L. Zgusta (Eds.), Wörterbücher: ein internationales Handbuch zur Lexicographie (pp. 1010–1019). De Gruyter.
Hausmann, F. J. (1997). Tout est idiomatique dans les langues. In M. Martins-Baltar (Ed.), La locution entre langue et usages (pp. 227–290). ENS Éditions.
Hill, G. N. & Thompson Hill, K. (2002). The people’s law dictionary. Taking the mystery out of legal language. MJF Books. Also available online at https://dictionary.law.com/default.aspx?review=true
Hockett, Ch. F. (1958). A course in modern linguistics. Macmillan.
Hoey, M. (2005). Lexical priming: A new theory of words and language. Routledge.
Hunston, S. (2008). Collocation strategies and design decisions. In A. Lüdeling & M. Kytö (Eds.), Corpus linguistics. An international handbook (pp. 154–168). De Gruyter.
Jopek-Bosiacka, A. (2011). Defining law terms: A cross cultural perspective. Research in Language. Special Issue on Legal Terminology: Approaches and Applications, 9.1, 9–29.
Jowitt’s dictionary of English law (3rd edition). 2010. Sweet and Maxwell.
Kilgarriff, A. (2005). Language is never, ever, ever, random. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 1/2, 263–276.
Kilgarriff, A., Baisa V., Bušta J., Jakubíček M. & Kovář V., Michelfeit J., Rychlý P. & Suchomel V. (2014). The Sketch Engine: ten years on. Lexicography, 1, 7–36.
Kjaer, A. L. (1990a). Context-conditioned word combinations in legal language. Terminology Science & Research 1/1–2, 21–32.
Kjaer, A. L. (1990b). Phraseology research – State-of-the-art. Terminology Science & Research, 1/1–2, 3–20.
Kjær, A. L. (2007). Phrasemes in legal texts. In H. Burger, D. Dobrovol’skij, P. Kühn & N. R. Noerrick (Eds.), Phraseologie/Phraseology: Ein internationales Handbuch zeitgenössischer Forschung /An international handbook of contemporary research (pp. 506–516). de Gruyter.
Kjellmer, G. (1994). A dictionary of English collocations. Clarendon Press.
Klabal, O. (2019). Corpora in legal translation: Overcoming terminological and phraseological asymmetries between Czech and English, CLINA 5–2, 165–186.
Koester, A. (2010). Building small specialised corpora. In A. O’Keeffe & M. McCarthy (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of corpus linguistics (pp. 66–79). Routledge.
L’Homme, M.-C. & Azoulay, D. (2020). Collecting collocations from general and specialised corpora: A comparative analysis. In G. Corpas Pastor & J.-P. Colson (Eds.), Computational Phraseology (pp. 151–175). John Benjamins.
Landau, S. I. (2001). Dictionaries: The art and craft of lexicography (2nd edition). Cambridge University Press.
Law, J. (Ed.). (2022), Oxford dictionary of law (10th edition). Oxford University Press. https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780192897497.001.0001/acref-9780192897497. [Accessed January 15, 2024].
Lehecka, T. (2015). Collocation and colligation. In J.-O. Östman & J. Verschueren (Eds.), Handbook of pragmatics (pp. 1–20). John Benjamins.
Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B. (1990). Meaning, synonymy, and the dictionary. In J. Tomaszczyk & B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (Eds.), Meaning and lexicography (pp. 181–208). John Benjamins.
Lyons, J. (1981). Language and linguistics. An introduction. Cambridge University Press.
Matilla, H. (2006). Comparative legal linguistics. Ashgate.
Matulewska, A. (2016). Semantic relations between legal terms. A case study of the intralingual relations of synonymy. Studies in Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric, 45(1), 16–174.
Mel’čuk, I. (1998). Collocations and lexical functions. In A. P. Cowie (Ed.), Phraseology, theory, analysis and application (pp. 23–53). Clarendon Press.
Michta, T. (2022). You shall know a term by the company it keeps: Collocations of the term evidence in general and legal corpora. Beyond Philology: An International Journal of Linguistics, Literary Studies and English Language Teaching, 19/1, 65–96.
Michta, T., Kloza M., Łompieś J., Mela M., Mela W., Miąc M., Newska J & L. Religa (2009). Studencki słownik kolokacji angielskiego języka medycyny. In M. Łukasik (Ed.), Debiuty Naukowe III (pp. 89–225). Katedra Języków Specjalistycznych UW.
Michta, T. & Mroczyńska, K. (2022). Towards a dictionary of legal English collocations. Wydawnictwo Naukowe Uniwersytetu Przyrodniczo-Humanistycznego w Siedlcach.
Money, J. (1955). Hermaphroditism, gender and precocity in hyperadrenocorticism: Psychologic findings. Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, 96, 253–264.
Nadler, J. & Mueller, P. A. (2017). Social psychology and the law. In F. Parisi (Ed.), Oxford handbook of law and economics Vol.1. Methodology and concepts (pp. 124–160). Oxford University Press.
Rzepkowska, A. (2023). The collocational profile of employment and work in UK employment law. Conversatoria Linguistica XV, 67–87.
Schiappa, E. (2022). Transgender exigency. Defining sex and gender in the 21st century. Routledge.
Siepmann, D. (2005). Collocation, colligation and encoding dictionaries. Part I: Lexicological aspects. International Journal of Lexicography, 18(4), 409–443.
Siepmann, D. (2006). Collocation, colligation and encoding dictionaries. Part II: Lexicographic aspects. International Journal of Lexicography, 19(1), 1–39.
Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford University Press.
Sinclair, J. (2004). Trust the text. Language, corpus and discourse. Routledge.
Stoller, R. J. (1964). A contribution to the study of gender identity. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 45, 220–226.
Stoller, R. J. (1968). Sex and gender: On the development of masculinity and femininity. London: Hogarth Press.
Taylor, C. (2021). Investigating gendered language through collocation. In J. Angouri & J. Baxter (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of language, gender, and sexuality (pp. 572–586). Routledge.
Whorf, B. L. (1956). Language, thought, and reality: selected writings. Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Wiegman, R. (2002). Academic feminism against itself. NWSA Journal 14(2), 18–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4316890. [Accessed January 6, 2024].
Więcławska, E. (2023a). Approaching legal multinomials from the sociolinguistic perspective–insights into authorship-based distinctions. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law-Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 36.4, 1699–1715.
Więcławska, E. (2023b). Binomials in English/Polish company registration discourse: The study of linguistic profile and translation patterns. V&R Unipress.
Woodley, M. (Ed.). (2013). Osborn’s concise law dictionary. Sweet & Maxwell Ltd.
Wouters, J. (2020). From an economic community to a union of values: The emergence of the EU’s commitment to human rights. In J. Wouters et al. (Eds), The European Union and human rights: Law and policy (Oxford, 2020; online edition, Oxford Academic, 18 Feb. 2021). https://
doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198814191.003.0002 [Accessed February 21, 2024].
Yevchuk, A. (2021). Plesionyms as a vocabulary teaching tool: The case of Estonian EFL learners. Sustainable Multilingualism, 19(1), p. 20–226.
Zlatev, J. & Blomberg, J. (2015). Language may indeed influence thought. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, 1631. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01631
Online sources
Cambridge Dictionary online. 2024. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english [Accessed January 6, 2024].
Collins English Dictionary online. 2024. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english [Accessed January 6, 2024].
Council of Europe: European Court of Human Rights, Handbook on European non-discrimination law. 2018. ISBN 978-92-871-9851-8 available at https://rm.coe.int/fra-2018-handbook-nondiscrimination-law-2018-en/1680a2b52b [Accessed February 1, 2024].
Equality Glossary. Council of Europe. March 2016. https://edoc.coe.int/en/gender-equality/ 6947-gender-equality-glossary.html [Accessed January 6, 2024].
European Institute for Gender Equality, What is gender mainstreaming, https://eige.europa.eu/gender-mainstreaming/what-is-gender-mainstreaming?language_content_entity=en [Accessed February 6, 2024].
Gender Equality Glossary: Terms and Concepts. UNICEF. 2017. https://www.unicef.org/rosa/media/1761/file/Genderglossarytermsandconcepts.pdf women
WHO: https://www.who.int/health-topics/gender#tab=tab_1 [Accessed January 16, 2024].
Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. 2024. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary
[Accessed January 6, 2024].
Siekiera, J. 2022. Gender equality in the European Union law – the use of the words “sex” and “gender” in the primary and secondary legislation. Available at https://efektywne-prawo.org.pl/gender-equality-in-the-european-union-law-the-use-of-the-words-sex-andgender-in-the-primary-and-secondary-legislation-dr-joanna-siekiera/ [Accessed February 1, 2024].
Wex. Legal Information Institute Cornell Law School. https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex [Accessed January 6, 2024].
University of Siedlce, Poland
Katarzyna Mroczyńska is a linguist with a background in economics, with her main research interest b ing collocations and the legal English genre. Other academic interests include translation of specialist texts, recent developments in computer-assisted translation and machine translation, borrowings in Polish specialist language, the role of metaphors in Business English, neurolinguistics, and the application of cognitive field theory in foreign language teaching and learning.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0367-1056
