‘Medical Men’ and ‘Mad Women’ - A Study into the Frequency of Words through Collocations

Frequent lexical patterns can explain how language, society and culture interact. In this paper, we analyze the most frequent adjectival collocates which precede lemmas WOMAN and MAN, by searching the node words woman, women, man and men in the British National Corpus (BNC) using the statistical procedure list. The primary postulate is that frequent collocational patterns reveal common societal and cultural concepts. The research is based on Sinclair’s theory about how frequency points to what is typical and central in a language (17). Furthermore, Stubbs’s understanding of a community’s value system being built up and maintained by the recurrent use of particular phrasings in texts (Words and Phrases 166) is explored through the repetition of lexical patterns in the corpus, thus exposing dominant cultural models