The socio-cultural conceptualisation of FEMININITY : Corpus evidence for Cognitive Models

International audienceThis study examines the possibility of extending Multifactorial Usage-Feature Analysis (Profile-Based Approach) to describe abstract conceptual structures such as those identified in Idealised Cognitive Model (ICM) research. The approach is argued to resolve two methodological limitations with the analytical framework of ICM. These limitations can be described as (i) a lack of means for identifying social variation in the structure posited and (ii) a lack of means for falsifying the structures identified with the framework. Multifactorial Usage-Feature Analysis is corpus-driven and quantified, permitting a multidimensional picture of the models that accounts for social variation as well as falsification through repeat analysis. The study focuses on the concept of FEMININITY. Instead of limiting the analysis to metaphoric structure, it takes a keyword lexical approach. The data are synchronic and restricted to a specific genre / register of American English