Investigating the collocational behaviour ofmanandwomanin the BNC using Sketch Engine

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the representation of men and women in the British National Corpus (BNC) by focussing on the collocational and grammatical behaviour of the noun lemmas man and woman (i.e., the nouns man/men and woman/women ). Using Sketch Engine (a powerful corpus query tool, which is described) I explore the functional distribution of the target lemmas, and reveal the structured and systematic nature of the differences in the way these terms for adult male and female human beings pattern with other word forms in different grammatical relations.