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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
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