Profiling idioms: a sociolexical approach to the study of phraseological patterns

Abstract

This paper introduces a novel approach to the study of lexical and pragmatic meaning called ‘sociolexical profiling’, which aims at correlating the use of lexical items with author-attributed demographic features, such as gender, age, profession, and education. The approach was applied to a case study of a set of English idioms derived from the Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs (PDEV), a corpus-driven lexical resource which defines verb senses in terms of the phraseological patterns in which a verb typically occurs. For each selected idiom, a gender profile was generated based on data extracted from the Blog Authorship Corpus (BAC) in order to establish whether any statistically significant differences can be detected in the way men and women use idioms in every-day communication. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of the gender profiles was subsequently performed, enabling us to test the validity of the proposed approach. If performed on a large scale, we believe that sociolexical profiling will have important implications for several areas of research, including corpus lexicography, translation, creative writing, forensic linguistics, and natural language processing.