Exploring the Adjective 'Sick' in Men's vs. Women's Online Magazines: A Corpus Analysis

https://doi.org/10.22146/jla.102166

Dwi Nurfitria Romadhona(1*), Putri Sabina Keisya(2), Zalefa Mufida(3)

(1) Universitas Padjadjaran
(2) Universitas Padjadjaran
(3) Universitas Padjadjaran
(*) Corresponding Author

Abstract


The word 'sick' has multiple meanings and functions in English, including as a noun, adjective, and slang expression. This study aims to investigate whether the adjective sick is used differently in men’s and women’s online magazines, particularly in terms of slang and emotional meanings. The data for this research are drawn from corpora of online magazines targeting male and female audiences, such as GQ and Elle. Using corpus linguistic methods, Word Sketch is employed to identify the collocates of sick and group them according to their grammatical relations. The analysis indicates that in men’s magazines, sick is more frequently used as slang to describe something impressive or appealing, while in women’s magazines it tends to be associated with emotional or negative contexts. These findings suggest that gender-targeted media reflect distinct language preferences, supporting the view that men and women exhibit different linguistic choices. This study contributes to a better understanding of gendered language use in contemporary online media


Keywords


sick; corpus linguistic; word sketch; online magazine

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.22146/jla.102166

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