Linguistic democratization, the goal or practice of increasing social equity through language, has not figured prominently in corpus studies. However, corpus-based approaches present the opportunity to probe questions of unequal linguistic representation on a large scale, providing crucial insights into how actors are classified in public discourse, especially with respect to the representation of gender relations and inequity. This paper draws on corpus methods to analyze the patterning of two generic, gendered nouns—woman and man—in American news television discourse. Results of both quantitative and qualitative analyses show that patterns for both grammatical factors (syntactic function, determiner type, pre-modification) and collocational behavior are largely consistent across networks, suggesting that gender ideologies expressed by newscasters and talk show hosts on both networks are not substantially different from one another. This study shows how elements of discourse that may be considered innocuous and below the level of consciousness—such as the position of certain nouns in the sentence, the determiners that specify them, and the adjectives that modify them—can provide valuable diagnostics of discourse-level democratization, and reveal deeper sociocultural ideologies about gendered individuals that are regularly perpetuated in public news discourse, regardless of the networks’ own political positioning.

中文翻译：

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“背景中的女人”：CNN 和 FOX 媒体话语中的性别名词

语言民主化，即通过语言增加社会公平的目标或实践，在语料库研究中并未占据突出地位。然而，基于语料库的方法提供了在大规模范围内探索不平等语言表征问题的机会，提供了关于如何在公共话语中对行为者进行分类的重要见解，尤其是在性别关系和不平等的表征方面。本文利用语料库方法来分析美国新闻电视话语中两个通用的、有性别的名词——女人和男人——的模式。定量和定性分析的结果表明，语法因素（句法功能、限定词类型、修饰前）和搭配行为的模式在整个网络中基本一致，这表明两个网络上的新闻主播和脱口秀主持人所表达的性别意识形态彼此之间没有本质区别。这项研究显示了可能被认为是无害的和低于意识水平的话语元素——例如某些名词在句子中的位置、指定它们的限定词以及修饰它们的形容词——如何提供有价值的话语诊断——水平民主化，并揭示关于性别个体的更深层次的社会文化意识形态，这些意识形态在公共新闻话语中经常存在，而不管网络自身的政治定位如何。