The Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded Encyclopedia of Shakespeare’s Language project has produced a resource allowing users to explore Shakespeare’s plays in a variety of (semi-automatic) ways, via a web-based corpus query processor interface hosted by Lancaster University. It enables users, for example, to interrogate a corpus of Shakespeare’s plays using queries restricted by dramatic genre, gender and/or social status of characters, and to target and explore the language of the plays not only at the word level but also at the grammatical and semantic levels (by querying part of speech or semantic categories). Using keyword techniques, we examine how female and male language varies in general, by social status (high or low) and by genre (comedy, history and tragedy). Among our findings, we note differences in the use of pronouns and references to male authority (female overuse of ‘I’ and ‘husband’ and male overuse of ‘we’ and ‘king’). We also observe that high-status males in comedies (as opposed to histories and tragedies) are characterised by polite requests (‘please you’) and sharp-minded ‘wit’. Despite many similarities between female and male usage of gendered forms of language (‘woman’), male characters alone use terms such as ‘womanish’ in a disparaging way.

由艺术与人文研究委员会资助的莎士比亚语言百科全书提供了一种资源，使用户可以通过兰开斯特大学主持的基于网络的语料库查询处理器界面以各种（半自动）方式探索莎士比亚的戏剧。例如，它使用户能够使用受戏剧性流派，性别和/或角色的社会地位限制的查询来查询莎士比亚戏剧的语料库，并且不仅可以在单词层面而且可以在戏剧层面上定位和探索戏剧的语言。语法和语义级别（通过查询部分语音或语义类别）。使用关键字技术，我们研究了女性和男性语言在总体上，社会地位（高或低）和体裁（喜剧，历史和悲剧）方面的变化。在我们的发现中，我们注意到代词在用法和提及男性权威方面的差异（女性对“我”和“丈夫”的过度使用以及男性对“我们”和“国王”的过度使用）。我们还观察到，喜剧中地位很高的男性（相对于历史和悲剧而言）具有礼貌的要求（“请您”）和思维敏锐的“机智”。尽管男女在使用性别形式的语言（“女人”）方面存在许多相似之处，但仅男性角色就以贬低的方式使用诸如“女人味”之类的术语。