Using Corpora to Analyze Gender - Softcover

The author does a splendid job of providing food for thought for both corpus linguistics and gender researchers alike. The book as a whole is well written and very accessible ... Each chapter provides stimulating research on gender and language (for the corpus linguist) and a useful description of corpus linguistic approaches to language (for the researcher in gender and language).
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics

[In Using Corpora to Analyze Gender] Baker examines very thoroughly the issue of male and female differences in language, perhaps one of the most convincing interrogations of this issue that I have read ... This impressive book gives a thorough introduction to the use of corpora in gender and language research ... and offers insights about data interpretation that are essential for all gender and language research.
Gender and Language

Written in what is now Baker's familiar, accessible style ... [This book] will satisfy corpus linguistics wanting to explore and write about questions relating to language and gender.
Discourse Studies

Corpus linguistics uses specialist software to identify linguistic patterns in large computerised collections of text - patterns which then must be interpreted and explained by human researchers.

This book critically explores how corpus linguistics techniques can help analysis of language and gender by conducting a number of case studies on topics which include: directives in spoken conversations, changes in sexist and non-sexist language use over time, personal adverts, press representation of gay men, and the ways that boys and girls are constructed through language. The book thus covers both gendered usage (e.g. how do males and females use language differently, or not, from each other), and gendered representations (e.g. in what ways are males and females written or spoken about). Additionally, the book shows ways that readers can either explore their own hypotheses, or approach the corpus from a "naïve†? position, letting the data drive their analysis from the outset.

The book covers a range of techniques and measures including frequencies, keywords, collocations, dispersion, word sketches, downsizing and triangulation, all in an accessible style.