Judging Italian and British women by the collocates they keep A cross-linguistic corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis of the lemmas donna and woman in the Italian and in the British web corpora

In this dissertation Corpus Linguistics methodology and Critical Discourse Analysis are combined in order to investigate the position of women in the Italian and in the British societies. To do so, the lemma donna and its English equivalent woman are investigated, respectively in the Italian web corpus (itTenTen 2016) and in the British web corpus (enTenTen 2015). In particular, the lexical profiles of the two keywords are traced by drawing on the analysis of their collocates and then compared. Moreover, from the semantic profiles of donna and woman five main topoi characterising the discourse about women stand out, namely “gender equality and women's rights”, “women's economic participation, empowerment and emancipation”, “violence”, “gender and ethnicity” and “support for women”. The analysis of the discourse associated with each topos allows the analyst to make some assumptions about how women are perceived in Italy and in the UK. To conclude, this dissertation proves that, although much progress towards gender equality has been made in the Italian and British societies, it does not seem to be enough yet, since women are in many cases still considered as inferior to men, thus experiencing many forms of discrimination and abuse.