‘Women and Work’: a Cross-Linguistic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study in German and in Italian

Abstract

In recent years, interest towards CADS has significantly grown but cross-linguistic analysis still represents a small niche in this research field, as emphasized in Partington et al. 2013. Furthermore, Schafroth (2015) highlighted that, in Romance and German Studies, the combination of Corpus Linguistics and Discourse Analysis has not yet received much attention. This contribution aims at investigating, from a comparative corpus-assisted perspective, how the discourse on ‘women and work’ is constructed in German and Italian. The analysis has been carried out on two large corpora (itTenTen and deTenTen). First, lexical collocates of sequences containing the combinations ‘women, work’, ‘work, women’, ‘men, work’ and ‘work, men’ have been collected both in Italian and in German. Then, a sample of concordance lines has been studied in further detail. Results of the collocational analysis show that the discourse on ‘women and work’ is constructed around different semantic areas in German and Italian (i.e. respectively around the topic of equal pay and that of equal opportunities). On the grounds of these results, it can be argued that in both countries the issue of ‘women and work’ is still considered ‘problematic’, even though the size and kind of ‘problems’ to be solved are different.