Artikel Korpus Uny (fallianda & Firnantia).docx

A CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF THE ADJECTIVAL COLLOCATES OF [BOY], [MAN], [GIRL], AND [WOMAN] IN CHINESE AND JAPANESE FAIRY TALES Fallianda1, Firnantia Lara2 Universitas Airlangga [email protected], [email protected]

ABSTRACT: The present study aims to determine the adjectival collocates of [boy], [man], [girl], and [woman] in fairy tales using the corpus linguistic approach. This study compares fairy tales from two different countries that have the same historical and cultural background. They are China and Japan. More specifically, this study chooses A Chinese Wonder Book and Japanese Fairy Tales from Gutenberg Project to be the corpus data. The size of the corpus is 52375 and 126981 words token respectively. In conducting this study, the data are processed using AntConc software. The analysis is based on Dixon’s (1982) theory on semantic categories. The researchers apply a corpus based study to confirm the researchers’ hypothesis that girls and women are more stereotyped than boys and men in the fairy tales. The comparison and the findings show that the adjectival collocates of [boy], [man], [girl], and [woman] in both cultures share similar and different adjectival collocates in terms of dimensions, physical properties, values, human propensities, and ages. Chinese text is found to share more stereotyped adjectival collocates than Japanese. The study then considers that Chinese culture values the structure of hierarchical relationship. On the contrary, the findings in Japanese text present a harmony between the good and bad values which modifies both gender. Keywords: adjective, Chinese and Japanese Fairy Tales, collocation, corpus study, stereotypes.

1.

Introduction Corpus linguistic is a powerful approach to provide empirical analysis of language use in a particular domain. According to Stubbs (2001, 3), corpus study can provide the cultural knowledge of particular domain. He further describes that a word has potential meaning in their collocations and can become cultural ‘keywords.’ Based on this definition, the current study is interested to conduct a corpus study of gender in fairy tales as literary genre which influence in providing cultural values for children especially girls. The findings are expected to provide different uses and meanings in the adjectival collocates of [boy], [girl], [man], and [woman]. Then, the cultural significance of the keywords is enriched by the comparison of Chinese and Japanese culture. The concern of gender practice in fairy tales becomes the particular interest in this study. Zipes [CITATION Zip061 \p 2 \n \t \l 1057 ] describes that fairy tales stick to the interest of patriarchal and politically conservative in both the production and reproduction of the texts. He also assumes that fairy tales use their ideological impact to

influence the life of a child into the dominant social standards of a culture [CITATION Zip06 \p 34 \n \t \l 1057 ]. For Jameson, fairy tales are seen as the aesthetic form of ideology by inventing imaginary through literary fairy tale discourse[CITATION Zip06 \p 3-4 \t \l 1057 ]. The current study aims to analyze the linguistic behaviors of fairy tales in different culture, they are Chinese and Japanese texts. Similarities of both culture can be seen for example through the conception of Confucianism and Taoism. These conceptions provide different points of view on the study of self and identity. Unlike Confucian who relies on social regulation and expectation of one’s self, Tao recognizes the differences of self and the other in which it exists in harmony and interdependent with each other [CITATION Sam06 \p 100 \t \l 1057 ]. Differences on both views are simultaneously analyzed. Based on the explanation above, the adjectival collocates of [boy], [girl], [man], and [woman] are chosen to be the keywords in both Chinese and Japanese texts. The analysis of adjectival collocates of [boy] and [girl] followed by [man] and [woman] is due to the fact that fairy tales are impressed the mind of the children and then later as adults. The context of the collocations is further analyzed in the Keyword in Context (KWIC). There are two corpus-based studies that are related to current study. There are Diaz’s study (2010) on Violence in the Brother Grimm’s Fairy Tales: A Corpus-Based Approach and Silva’s study (2012) on Fairy Tales and Moral Values: A Corpus-Based Approach. Diaz (2010) uses British National Corpus (BNC) to collect the data and then compare the finding with the other corpora, Cobuild Concordancer. The finding seems to indicate that there was a higher than average percentage of the use of words related directly or indirectly to violence. Silva (2012) conducts the study of moral value collocations from ten out of 210 tales in the brothers Grimm’s collections. The software used to analyze the corpus data was AntConc 3.2.4 and further compare it with the moral values collocations in Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). And the findings show that many positive and negative words can give indications of the construction of moral values. The two previous studies focuses on the comparison of Grimm’s fairy tales with BNC and COCA corpus and the focus is either about moral values or violence acts. The previous studies did not exclusively investigates gender practices, especially the comparison of different culture. The current study aims to analyze the adjectival collocates of [boy], [girl], [man], and [woman] based on the frequency of the occurrences and its contexts in concordances. The article uses square brackets to include the plural forms of the keywords, for example girl and girls. The Chinese text that includes the title of “A Chinese Wonder Book” is written by Norman Hinsdale Pitman. Meanwhile, the Japanese text attends to the title of “Japanese Fairy Tales” which is compiled and translated by Yei Theodora Ozaki. The current study also wants to find out the comparison between “A Chinese Wonder Book” and “Japanese Fairy Tales” in the distributions of the adjectival collocates. 2.

Research Method

This study conducts a mixed method approach that combines the approach of quantitative and qualitative analysis. The data collection includes both numeric (e.g. frequency and rack of the collocations) and text information in order to represent and confirm final findings of analysis of both quantitative and qualitative information. In the

current study, the quantitative information is part of computerized corpus linguistic study where the collocations and their frequency are automatically calculated by a computer program. However these information should be interpreted further and this requires some qualitative considerations to confirm the frequency of adjectival collocates. The data in this study are gathered through random sample in collecting data of fairy tales in each culture. There is no intentional selection (or particular set of criteria) of the data for example the Chinese or Japanese version of Cinderella (Yeh-Shen), Red Little Riding Hood (Lon Po Poh) and other stories in order to avoid creating bias of some kind. The classification above follows Propp’s research [CITATION Pro09 \n \t \l 1057 ] which defines that fairy tales do not require fairies – it also includes fable, myth, and legend. Therefore, all the data are thoroughly representative. The data are chosen from Gutenberg Project, a web-site that lists the representative of fairy tales and short stories across languages. The size of the corpus is 52375 tokens of Chinese text and 126981 tokens of Japanese text. The step of collecting data is by downloading the data in the form of .txt in the web-site. Further, the steps of using AntConc software are described as follows: we input both data into AntConc ver.3.4.4 software, choose Collocates, determine the Windows Span 2L to 2R, choose Sort by Frequency, use Advanced Search to insert the keywords each keyword (e.g. [boy]), then clicked Apply and Search. Thus, the other keywords of [girl], [man], and [woman] follows. After the lists of collocates appear, we choose only the adjectival collocates which describes the adjective class [ CITATION Dix05 \l 1057 ]. The lists of adjectival collocations that appear in the keywords are represented in table view. This process applies on both Chinese and Japanese texts. After we obtains the lists of collocations from each keywords [boy], [girl], [man], and [woman], we limit our analysis of adjectives that describes personal characteristics based on semantic categories of adjective class by Dixon [CITATION Dix05 \p 85 \n \t \l 1057 ]. However, since we limit our analysis to personal characteristics, types of ‘qualification’ and ‘similarity’ of things, states, or events are excluded. The following categories of adjective class are described: 1) DIMENSION e.g. big, great, short, thin, round, narrow, deep. 2) PHYSICAL PROPERTY, e.g. hard, strong, clean, cool, heavy, sweet, fresh, cheap, quiet, noisy; this includes a CORPOREAL SUBTYPE, e.g. well, sick, ill, dead; absent; beautiful, ugly. 3) SPEED, e.g. quick (at), fast (at), slow (at), rapid, sudden. 4) AGE, e.g. new, old, young, modern. 5) COLOUR, e.g. white, black, red, crimson, mottled, golden. 6) VALUE, e.g. (a) good, bad, lovely, atrocious, perfect; (b) odd, strange, curious; necessary, crucial; important; lucky. 7) DIFFICULTY, e.g. easy, difficult, tough, hard, simple. 8) VOLITION, e.g. deliberate, accidental, purposeful. 9) QUALIFICATION, with a number of subtypes: e.g. definite, possible, usual, likely, sure, correct. 10) HUMAN PROPENSITY, again with a number of subtypes: e.g. fond, angry, happy, unsure, eager, clever, honest, busy.

11) SIMILARITY, comparing two things, states or events, e.g. like, unlike, similar (to), different (from), equal (to/with).

3.

Findings and Discussions The findings and discussions describe the adjectival collocates of each keyword search of [boy], [girl], [man], and [woman] in “A Chinese Wonder Book” and “Japanese Fairy Tales.” The summary of adjectival collocates limits the top eight adjectives in all of the keywords. The findings will be presented in tables and descriptions of analysis. The process of analyzing the findings can be described as follows: firstly, we obtain the quantitative findings from the corpus tool, AntConc and then, we select the top eight adjectival collocates to describe them qualitatively. As we can see the qualitative approach complements the appropriate descriptions of top eight adjectives in both contexts. 3.1 The adjectival collocates of [boy] in “A Chinese Wonder Book” and “Japanese Fairy Tales” “A Chinese Wonder Book”

“Japanese Fairy Tales”

1. Old

1. Good

2. Little

2. Little

3. Good

3. Golden

4. Poor

4. Older

5. Clever

5. Mere

6. Western

6. Kind

7. Silly

7. Cruel

8. Missing

8. Bad

Table 1: The Adjectival collocates of [boy] in “A Chinese Wonder Book” and “Japanese Fairy Tales” From the corpus evidence in table 1, we present eight typical adjectival collocates of the noun [boy] that can be found both in “A Chinese Wonder Book” and “Japanese Fairy Tales.” In table 1, the corpus evidence informs us the noun [boy] are associated with adjectives old, older, little and good in both contexts. The phrase ‘old [boy]’ presents the highest frequency in Chinese context which intentionally used to describe a fairy in the text. From the Keyword in Context (KWIC), the identification of fairy in ‘old [boy]’ shows us that boys are described as someone who have pure love and nice behavior. In Japanese text the phrase ‘older [boy]’ associates with the literal meanings of age. As we can see in KWIC of the phrase ‘older [boy],’ the adjective describes the superiority towards the younger boy than him and the cruel acts toward animals. The other adjectives that precede the noun [boy] are good and little. If we focus on the peculiarity in Chinese text, the noun [boy] includes the adjectives such as poor, clever, western, silly, and missing. Related to the contextual meaning of ‘poor [boy]’ the adjective describes the struggle of the boy to escape from an unfortunate events or situations. Another adjective that becomes the characteristic of

the boys is clever which describes the intelligent thinking of a person. It can be seen from the KWIC that the adjective clever shows us a favorable feature of boy’s way of thinking where he can think quickly in saving the turtle’s life. We can also see that the boy has a good relationship with animals he encountered. The other adjectival collocates which equally distributed with the noun [boy] are western, silly, and missing. The adjectival collocates of [boy] which are frequently used in Japanese Fairy Tales are golden, mere, kind, cruel and bad. The phrase ‘golden [boy]’ is found to be the third highest frequency in Japanese text. By looking at the KWIC, the adjective golden describes the special and wonderful characteristics of a person (Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, 2010). The KWIC also shows the eight years old boy named Kintaro who has a very special ability. He is a very strong boy, has animal friends in the forest and build a good relationship with them by learning to understand and to speak their strange talks. Other adjectives mere, kind, cruel and bad describes the social impact of the boys’ attitudes and actions. 3.2 The adjectival collocates of [man] in “A Chinese Wonder Book” and “Japanese Fairy Tales” “A Chinese Wonder Book”

“Japanese Fairy Tales”

1. Old

1. Old

2. Young

2. Good

3. Rich

3. Young

4. Wise

4. Wise

5. Great

5. Wicked

6. Poor

6. Kind

7. Good

7. Mortal

8. Little

8. Great

Table 2: The adjectival collocates of [man] in “A Chinese Wonder Book” and “Japanese Fairy Tales” The adjectival collocates of the noun [man] which can be found both texts are old, young, wise, great, and good. The corpus evidence in table 2 shows that the noun [man] followed by age modifier to represent whether the characters in both Chinese and Japanese text are kind or wicked. The other adjectival collocates that easily can be found in the noun [man] are young, wise, great and good. We can conclude then that the noun [man] mostly represent the positive adjectival collocates in both texts. As it can be seen in table 2, there are several adjectives that are different between Chinese and Japanese text. In Chinese context, the noun [man] particularly includes the adjective such as rich, poor, and little. The phrase ‘rich [man]’ represents someone who possesses abundant money or knowledge. On the contrary, the adjective poor represents someone who has very little money. It is an interesting finding in which such contrast meaning between adjective rich and poor often use to accompany the noun [man]. Thus, we can define that the possession of men in China is very important. We can also refer to the distribution of adjective poor among the other positive adjectival

collocates of men that men should struggle to make himself in a high position among society. We will explain further in the comparison of Chinese and Japanese context where the social hierarchy and regulation are highly considered by the Chinese. The adjectives which present in Japanese context, but not in Chinese context are wicked, kind and mortal. These adjectives show us different contextual meanings from the Chinese text. On the one hand, Chinese text emphasizes the social implication of men’s possessions. On the other hand, in Japanese Fairy Tales the negative adjectival collocates represent the men’s behavior and values. 3.3 The adjectival collocates of [girl] in “A Chinese Wonder Book” and “Japanese Fairy Tales” “A Chinese Wonder Book”

“Japanese Fairy Tales”

1. Little

1. Little

2. Slave

2. Young

3. Beautiful

3. Motherless

4. Trembling

4. Beautiful

5. Sick

5. Tiny

6. Poor

6. Poor

7. Young

7. Innocent

8. Miserable

8. Good

Table 3: The adjectival collocates of [girl] in “A Chinese Wonder Book” and “Japanese Fairy Tales” From the corpus evidence, table 3 presents eight typical adjectival collocates of the noun [girl] in Chinese and Japanese texts. The findings present some similarities of particular adjectives such as little, young, beautiful, and poor in both culture. This corpus evidence informs us that girls in fairy tales are associated with little, young, beautiful, and particularly poor. The evidence also shows that fairy tales often use phrase ‘beautiful [girl]’ and ‘young [girl]’ not the otherwise around. Another adjective we describe is the phrase of ‘poor [girl]’ that refer to the meaning of both having very little money and deserving pity and sympathy (Oxford English Learner’s Dictionary, 2010). In the particular context of Chinese culture, the noun [girl] tends to use the negative adjectival collocates such as slave, trembling, sick, and miserable. The phrase ‘slave [girl]’ presents the second highest frequency in collocations. The evidence of this phrase in Chinese fairy tales show that slavery represents the socio-cultural value in China at past. As we can conclude from the examples of the Keyword in Contexts (KWIC), the view of ‘slave [girl]’ in fairy tales presents the value of gratitude, respect, and obedience toward her master, while in other literatures the phrase ‘slave [girl]’ may be subjected to sexual exploitation. Another adjective that precede the noun [girl] is the physical properties of sick. By confirming the context of this adjective, girl often suffers in her youth life for example for particular health problem. We can also assume that the girl in Chinese text is a weak character that lacks in either strength or power. The same

analysis of the inability of girls to overcome particular events in her life can be seen from the other phrases ‘trembling [girl]’ and ‘miserable [girl].’ The adjectival collocates of [girl] in Japanese text show quite similar with the Chinese text. The phrase ‘motherless [girl]’ can be related to the unfortunate events or situations they have gone through. The context in KWIC also shows that the girls are often treated unfairly particularly by the step-mother because she no longer has a mother. The following adjective tiny, innocent, and good presents the girl in a good value but less in power. Therefore, these adjectives can still be interpreted to be a weak personal character of a girl. The context also shows that the phrase of ‘tiny [girl]’ is followed by the physical characteristic of beauty. Then, the phrase of ‘innocent [girl]’ and ‘good [girl]’ shows us the social descriptions and expectations toward the girl’s value, they lacks of awareness and knowledge and they have to be free from guilt or evil things. 3.4 The adjectival collocates of [woman] in “A Chinese Wonder Book” and “Japanese Fairy Tales” “A Chinese Wonder Book”

“Japanese Fairy Tales”

1. Old

1. Old

2. Frightened

2. Beautiful

3. Beautiful

3. Poor

4. Sorrowful

4. Good

5. Queenly

5. Wicked

6. Poor

6. Wonderful

7. Helpless

7. Mortal

8. Hard

8. Model

Table 4: The adjectival collocates of [woman] in “A Chinese Wonder Book” and “Japanese Fairy Tales” The corpus evidence in Table 4 shows that three typical adjectives (e.g. old, beautiful, and poor) occur in the collocations of the noun [woman] in both texts. This corpus evidence shows that in addition to age modifier (e.g. old) that occupied the noun [woman], physical properties of women and her ability to do things also modified the noun [woman]. The highest occurrences of age in tales also usually refers to either the characteristics of kindness or wickedness. If we see from the numerical information of adjectives beautiful, we can assume that the noun [woman] often use physical properties of a person. This adjective is similar to the adjective class that modifies the noun [girl]. The evidence of the phrase ‘poor [woman]’ is less described in Chinese text, while in Japanese text the adjective poor preceded the phrase ‘old [woman].’ As shown in table 4, there are several adjectives which are different between Chinese and Japanese text. In Chinese text, the particular adjectives are frightened, sorrowful, queenly, helpless, and hard. These adjectives mostly describes the human propensities with different number of subtypes. We can conclude that woman suffers through the unhappy situation over her lifetime. Meanwhile, the adjective of queenly which originally describes as ‘the female ruler of an independent state that has a royal

family’ but reveals the adjective class of fondness for a children based on the Keyword in Context (KWIC) (Oxford Learners’ Dictionary, 2010). The same analysis can be applied to the phrase of ‘helpless [woman].’ Another adjective class of value that collocates with the noun [woman] is hard which is used in the phrase ‘hard-hearted [woman].’ Moreover there are adjectives that can only be found in Japanese text, but not in Chinese text. Those adjectives are good, wicked, wonderful, mortal, and model. The adjectives are particularly unique since the adjective class of value and physical properties is in the high rank of collocations. The value of woman in the phrase of ‘good [woman],’ ‘wicked [woman],’ and ‘wonderful [woman]’ frequently use in fairy tales. Then, the physical properties of mortal and model often follows the noun [woman] in Japanese context. We can see that Japanese text consider the adjective class of values and physical properties rather than that of Chinese text with human propensities. 3.5 Comparisons between the adjectival collocates of [boy], [man], [girl], and [woman] in “A Chinese Wonder Book” and in “Japanese Fairy Tales” If we combine all of the keywords [boy], [man], [girl], and [woman] in both Chinese and Japanese texts, we can confirm gender stereotypes especially for girls in the genre of fairy tales. In the summary of the male and female keywords, the data shows us the peculiarity of adjectives. On the one hand, we can see that the male keywords especially for the noun [man] which represent the men’s ability to make a good judgement and good values (e.g. wise, good and great) of a person. On the other hand, the female keywords incline to show us the physical beauty of women and girls and the unfortunate situations they struggle. The summary of both male and female keywords are presented in table 5a and 5b respectively. Only in “A Chinese Only in “Japanese Both “A Chinese Wonder Book” Fairy Tales” Wonder Book” and “Japanese Fairy Tales” The noun [boy] poor, clever, golden, mere, kind, old/older, little, western, silly, cruel, bad good missing The noun [man] rich, poor, little, wicked, kind, old, young, good, bad mortal, brave wise, great Table 5a: The summary of adjectival collocates of male keywords Only in “A Chinese Only in “Japanese Both “A Chinese Wonder Book” Fairy Tales” Wonder Book” and “Japanese Fairy Tales” The noun [girl] slave, trembling, motherless, tiny, little, young, sick, miserable innocent, poor beautiful, poor The noun [woman] frightened, good, wicked, old, beautiful, poor sorrowful, queenly, wonderful, mortal, helpless, hard model Table 5b: The summary of adjectival collocates of female keywords

Next, we discuss the comparison of adjectival collocates of all the keywords between Japanese and Chinese text. In Japanese text, we can summarize that the male and female keywords mostly represents the adjectival categories of values. The phrase can be described as follows: ‘golden [boy],’ ‘bad [boy],’ ‘wicked [man],’ ‘kind [man],’ ‘motherless [girl],’ ‘innocent [girl],’ ‘wonderful [woman]’ and ‘wicked [woman].’ The findings interestingly present us a harmony between the good and bad values which modifies both gender. We can consider that these stylistic patterns indeed belong to Japanese culture since Japan highly respects harmony to avoid confrontations. Gritzner, et al also defines that “Japan is traditionally a group-orientated society in which no one individual wants to stand out. To do so shows great disrespect and dishonor" [CITATION Gri03 \p 92 \n \t \l 1057 ]. Thus, we can conclude that Japanese culture inclined to the Taoist belief rather than the Confucius. If we analyze the peculiarity of adjectival collocates in Chinese text, different categories of adjective may appear. In table 5a and 5b, we can see that there is a wide disparity between the adjectival collocates of male and female keywords. The corpus evidence shows us that the noun [boy] and [man] have the highest frequency of positive adjectival categories in human propensity (e.g. in the phrase ‘clever [boy],’ ‘rich [man],’ etc.) and values (e.g. in the phrase ‘good [boy]/[man],’ and ‘great [man]’). On the contrary, the corpus evidence of women collocations shows us the highest frequency of negative collocates of human propensity and values of a person. It can be seen in the phrase such as ‘trembling [girl],’ helpless [woman],’ ‘slave [girl],’ hard-hearted [woman],’ and etc. Therefore, we can consider that Chinese culture considers the structure of hierarchical relationship rather than the harmony in the relationship [CITATION Sam06 \p 99 \t \l 1057 ]. In other words, fairy tales in China represent the cultural values of subordinated groups, women, children, and many others. 4.

Conclusion

The current study has shown the findings of adjectival collocates of keywords [boy], [man], [girl], and [woman] and the comparison between Chinese and Japanese fairy tales. From the corpus evidence, the current study finds that gender stereotypes reflects in the fairy tales especially the adjectival collocates that modifies the noun [girl]. The differences between the male and female keywords both in Chinese and Japanese fairy tales can be seen from the distribution of categories of human propensities, values and physical properties. The noun [boy] and [man] in both culture are often modifies by the adjectives good, wise and great. On the contrary the noun [girl] and [woman] are limited to the adjectives beautiful and poor in addition to the absence of the adjective good for the noun [woman]. The corpus evidence has given the description of cultural values in each culture. We can consider that Japanese tends to highly consider Taoist value, the value of harmony in a social relationship. It can be seen from the equal distribution of good and bad values of the personal characteristics. This analysis is shown with the equal distribution of adjectives golden, brave, innocent, wonderful, bad, wicked, motherless, and many others. On the contrary, Chinese culture seems to value the patriarchal hierarchy to define the male and female gender relationship. The adjectival collocations has shown the tendency of negative meanings for the noun [girl] and [woman] on the categories of human propensity and values. This is shown with the adjectives slave, sick, sorrowful, helpless, hard-hearted, and many others.

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