WAY TO DETECT GENDER INHERENT TEXT ELEMENTS

Abstract

Gender linguistic characteristics become apparent essentially at the lexical level. So evaluating frequency of use becomes the main research method: one set of words is more frequent in the texts written by women, others are more frequent in men’s texts. The procedure of gender attribution based on this approach was tested on a large sample of English texts (22 authors) and proved to be quite effective. The placement of authors on the “scale of masculinity” allows us to put forward and solve a number of nontrivial problems. In particular, the hypothesis was advanced that compared to the 19th century authors the level of masculinity of contemporary male authors has decreased while the level of masculinity of female authors increased.