His eyes narrowed — her eyes downcast: contrastive corpus-stylistic analysis of female and male writing

Abstract

This study presents a comparative and cross-linguistic (English and Czech) examination of femaleand male characters in contemporary British and Czech fiction texts written by female and maleauthors. We approach the texts within the corpus stylistics framework using four broadly comparablecorpora of British and Czech fiction. Our focus is on the most frequent nouns occurring withthe possessive pronouns his and her and jeho and její, respectively. By examining the nouns we lookat how female and male characters are linguistically represented: what are the main differences betweentheir representation and to what extent they are similar. We also aim to look at whether theauthor’s gender plays a role in the process of characterisation. Further, we aim to pinpoint the differencesin characterisation by comparing the British and Czech fiction texts.