The Visibility Of Masculine And Feminine Languages In Columns

With the beginning of the feminist movement, gender studies developed over the "woman phenomenon” and focused only on woman researches for many years. Gender and media relations investigated in the main axis of “women's representation in the media”. The "representation of women in media texts" tried to problematized in the perspective of content analysis, discourse analysis and semiology and over these representation forms, "the image of women in patriarchal society" tried to be revealed. In recent years, as the stereotyped roles attached to man and woman underwent a change, the concept of gender has begun to be examined in different dimensions. Researches about media professionals show the existence of a male dominated media structure is still out there. As of March 2014, according to bianet.org and based on mastheads, women journalists were represented by 19% whereas men 81% in Turkish newspapers. Therefore, the news language still regenerates sexist representations as it carries masculine characteristics. The columns, that the agenda is interpreted from different angles and presented to the readers, are accepted as an important and effective content of the newspapers. Columnists examine the agenda, propose solutions to problems and present their ideas in a specific narrative and linguistic style of their own. This study studies how male and female stereotypes attributed to man and woman in social life are represented by columnists. A specialized corpus, named “TS Column Corpus” was build by 9982 columns harvested from online versions of Turkish Internet Newspapers between 2014 and 2015. The data studied over the frequency of word choices by male and female columnists and analyzed by using corpus linguistics, content and discourse analysis methods, to figure out the reflections of masculine and feminine features in the texts.


Introduction
The person who exists in social life with language is able to reproduce the ideology and cross over allows the transfer of culture from generation to generation.The media is definitely an important tools used in the communication via language.There are many studies about media.This research focuses on the language used in the media especially used by male and female columnists.The main topic is of this research is to find out how columnists, who are the leaders of opinion in society, use gender differences in their columns.In the first section, feminist approach and theoretical information about the media is given.In the application section, using the corpus build, whose details will be given below, used to examine the data by the corpus linguistics, discourse and content analysis methods.

Sex and Gender
Sex is the term that is used to explain the features of biological, physiological, and genetic structure of a person.It mainly describes man and woman phenomenon based on these differences.In this regard, chromosome structure and genitals are the determiners of the sex as a biological being.However, "gender" imposes different roles and social responsibility to men and women, which differs according to cultural, geographic, and social structures.Gender, which is rebuilt by the society according to its cultural structure, determines perceptions of sex in that culture.In other words, gender refers to the socially constructed characteristics of women and men -such as norms, roles and relationships of and between groups of women and men.It varies from society to society and can be changed.While most people are born either male or female, they are taught to behave appropriate according to norms -including how they should interact with others of the same or opposite sex within households, communities and work places.
According to Joan Scott, gender is the founding element of social relations based on discernible differences between sexes and gender is the main way to make power relations clear.Gender is the main field, which directly expresses power, thus perception shapes concrete and symbolic organization of social life and perception.The sexual differences between bodies used to legitimize a number of social relations, which are unrelated with sex.Conceptual languages put forward differentiation for signification, and sexual difference is the valid way of showing differentiation (Scott: 2007, p;38).All phenomenons on the basis of socialization are constantly being rebuilt in a way that defines, affirms, or criticizes political power.Simone de Beauvoir emphasizes the social structuring rather than the biological structure of the sex with the expression of "one is not born as a woman, but rather becomes, a woman" in her book "Second Sex"(De Beauvoir: 2010).People's gender-specific behaviors are shaped by how they are raised.The community they live in determines the genderbased behavior and attitudes of people in their homes, school, work, and social life.According to Harding gender is a natural consequence of the gender difference or is an analytical classification of individuals, in which they organize their social activities, rather than a simple social variable attributed to culturally different forms of culture (van Zoonen: 1997).According to Connell, gender is a concept associated with social structures and relationships outside of individual characteristics.Therefore, gender is also a feature of collectivities, institutions and historical processes (Connel: 1998, p.190).
Scott describes gender as a political arena and emphasizes that gender is a perceptual lens in which the meanings of masculine / feminine concepts were taught.
Women can be compassionate, patient, affectionate, gentle, weak, in need of protection, passive, emotional and so on, not only because of their physical characteristics.In addition, being logical, strong, offensive, warrior and vulgar are not innate for men.All these adjectives are concepts, which are formed by the social structure of the individual and are constructed in the social process.The main reason of women's discrimination in society is based on gender rather than biological differences.Gender is an extremely important concept in terms of feminism and it is a discussion field that is used in almost all feminist studies until the present day.

Waves of Feminism
Feminism is an ideology focused on "woman" as the word itself is derived from the word feminine.It is built on the fight of equality at political, social, economic and legal fields.Some have sought to locate the roots of feminism in ancient Greece with Sappho (570 BC), the medieval world with Hildegard of Bingen (d.1179) or Christine de Pizan (d.1434).Certainly Olympe de Gouges (d.1791), Mary Wollstonecraft (d.1797) and Jane Austen (d.1817) are foremothers of the modern women's movement.All these women advocated for the dignity, intelligence, and basic human potential of the female sex.However, it was not until the late nineteenth century that the efforts for women's equal rights coalesced into a clearly identifiable and self-conscious movement rather than a series of movement (Rampton Marta, 2015).
Wollstonecraft is regarded as the pioneer of liberal feminism as she defended equality on the basis of education right.In her book 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman', which is accepted as the first book written on feminist theory, Mary Wollstonecraft argued that the government should give the same education right for women as they gave to men, because women is also a part of the public life.
In 1869, John Stuart Mill published his book "The Subjection of Women".In this book Mill says "a sex dominating the other is not a right and is one of the biggest obstacles on developing humanity."With this statement, he became mainstay of egalitarianism discourse of liberal feminist theory.
Feminist engagement with the discipline of history has a long, rich and important pedigree.The nineteenth-century awakening, twentieth-century suffrage renewal, and the second-wave women's liberation movement in the 1970s.(Liddington, 2001).By late 1990's, the feminist actions are called as the third wave of feminism.

The First Wave of Feminism
The first wave of feminism took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, emerging out of an environment of urban industrialism, and liberal and socialist politics.The goal of this wave was to open up opportunities for women, with a focus on suffrage.Liberal feminism is the first type of feminism and therefore referred as the first wave of feminism.
Women who are particularly excluded from public sphere in social life could not take part in the definition of citizenship.For this reason, first wave feminists generally tried to have equal rights with men in legal, civil and political terms as well as having opportunity for education.The most important feature of liberal feminists was their thinking towards the family insitution.
However, liberal feminists argue that an equal division of labor for women and men in the family institution should be made, with the influence of American culture.One of the reasons focusing to women's education is that they can be more successful in fulfilling housework and motherhood responsibilities.They are not against the role of being a parent or a mother in this period.Their struggle is the masculine domination in a masculine dominated public.

The second wave of feminism
The second wave began in the 1960s and continued to the 1990s.While the first wave feminists have struggled to equalize women rights with men in legal and political space, second wave feminists, in addition to inquiry traditional feminine roles, have also tried to demonstrate that racial, class and gender discrimination in the social area.One of the main motivation of the second wave is certainly the book "Second Sex", written by Simone de Beauvoir.From her book, "one is not born as a woman, but rather becomes, a woman" became the motto of the era.This became the first publicly argument of the gender.The book hands on knowledge and experiences about how gender roles are shaped, reconstructed and taught by family and community after birth.This wave unfolded in the context of the anti-war and civil rights movements and the growing self-consciousness of a variety of minority groups around the world.The New Left was on the rise and the voice of the second wave was increasing radical (Rampton Marta, 2015).
The motto ''the personal is political'' is clipped from the words of antiracist activist Anne Braden1 and adopted by civil rights activists and New Left at first, then by feminist activists.According to Becky, the idea behind the slogan is that, many things that are thought to be deemed to the history are actually deeply political issues, such as abortion, unemployment, birth, death, illnes etc. (Becky, 2002, p. 347).
The appearance of women in the international arena has took many years and many struggles.In historical order, the most important studies and initiatives are: 1947: 'The Commission on the Status of Women' was established within the scope of UN.
1975: 'First World Conference on Women' held in Mexico City.UN introduced international standarts and sanctions to ensure equality between men and women.
1979: Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was accepted.With this convention, discrimination against women has been defined in a broader perspective and national and international targets have been taken in order to take precautions to eliminate all forms and discrimination2 .
1993: The World Conference on Human Rights held in Vienna and it was a turning point for women rights."The Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women" was accepted at the Vienna conference and it is the first human rights document specifically addressing violence against women 1 .1995: Beijing Platform.The most important articles of the convention are articles 234 and 235 that refer to two main strategic objectives.First is to increase the participation and access of women to the expression and decision-making in media and new technologies.Second is to promote a balanced and non-stereotype portrait of women in media.
Recommendations to NGOs include establishing media monitoring groups, effective use of information technology, networking and organizing joint programs between NGOs, women's organizations and professional media associations, and advocating equality between women and men, especially women's human rights (Turkish Journalists Association, 2016).

The Third Wave of Feminism
Third wave of feminism or "post feminism" arise in early 1990's, when a group of young people, calling themselves as the third wave feminists, people gathered to protest a high court in the United States.The first wave defined itself as the continuation of the first.However, the third wave existed upon a completely different struggle area.The first two waves focused on achieving equality between sexes.Because the risk of sexual harassment has no relevance with race or economic status of the victim.But, by the influence of the postmodern movement, the third wave emphasized those differences such as sexual preference, race, economic status etc.
Postmodernism examines language with a critical approach.Language is a completely transparent tool in the modernist point of view.According to postmodernism, language creates facts.
According to Lyotard, knowledge, "rather than being objective, is the combination of assumptions regulated by language rules" (Lyotard: 1992).Postmodern feminism examined the language in order to reveal the male dominant elements that it contains, by using various methods in the scope of grammar, semantic, semiotics and morphology.

Media as a Language Transmitter
Mass media with the ability to transfer verbal, written, printed, visual and audible texts and images of all kinds to large masses has been differentiated and enriched in terms of form and content with the advancement of technology in recent years.By the possibilities provided by Internet, every kind of content could be transmit in various forms and people can interact with each other.The media conveys all kinds of messages to the masses with different socio-demographic characteristics, after altering it according to their policy and formatting it according to their publishing system (Mora, 2008, page 6).
The first studies about gender and media focused on how women represented in media.The studies in Turkey are also according to this path.These studies put forward that women represented less than men in media and the traditional roles of women emphasized.Women described as mother, wife and violence victim.Another field of study is the employment of women in media.According to these studies, women still face "glass ceiling syndrome" and can not reach the positions that they deserve in the male dominated media.
All those appear at the news production process.The sex becomes an identifier for hard (politics, economy, etc.) and soft (health, life, travel etc.) news.The hard news produced by males and soft news produced by females.

Columnist Authorship
One of the basic principles of journalism is the distinction between news and commentary.News should be objective.However, the columns contain personal ideas.The columnists defend the ideologies that they advocate about the events that make up the agenda within the ideology they belong to (Yağcıoğlu, 2002, p.124).These ideas vary considerably in terms of ideology, depending on the type of newspaper and the point of view (Van Dijk, 1998, p. 21).Interpretations are subjective critical texts containing general thoughts or everyday events and cannot be criticized (Tokgöz, 2000, p. 40).
Compared to printed versions of the newspapers, the Internet allowed much space for columnist.This leads an increase both in the number of columnist writing on a periodic basis and the diversity of the topics.Columns have influence for shaping the public opinion.Besides, the possibility of sharing a column with a single click in social media made a dramatic contribution to the number of reads.The ideas put forth by the columnist in different fields, from sport to politics and economics to foreign politics, are so effective that it can draw controversy boundaries of that field.

Masculine and Feminine Language
The shaping and mutual sharing of people's thoughts in the mental processes and the emergence of new ideas and ideologies through these exchanges are possible through linguistic communication.This leads to socialization and language interaction."Language" is a tool that allows individuals to communicate emotions, thoughts and knowledge, and to communicate with each other.The language provides communication between people is a precursor to social life, and the intermediary and carrier of knowledge, skill and value (Sencer: 1982, p. 3-5).According to Erol, if the cultural structure of a society is need to be understood, the language should be observed as it contains many clues about the culture (Erol, 2014, p. 211).
The languages developed by different groups and sections within the social structure differ from each other.However, the dominant language is the language of the authority.Social structures understood by solving this dominant language and discourse.The existence of sexist discourse that humiliates women and woman body are evidence of the existence of gender relations in the culture dominated by men (Hodge, 1988, p. 5).
The theory of "domination", which discussed by the second wave of feminism, has focused on the fundamental differences between masculine and feminine language.The pioneer of feminist language studies is Robin Lakoff's "Language and the Women's Place" (1975), that marks the debate on gender and language.

Method and Importance of the Study
This study questions masculine and feminine reflections in the language in regard of gender.The data used is base on the columns in Turkish media, which plays a crucial role on affecting society in regard of reproduction of ideology.
TS Columns Corpus 1 is composed of 25.915 columns collected from online newspapers (Cumhuriyet, Radikal, T24) and various authors of them.The data collected by using Scrapy, a web crawler coded with Python programming language.The number of columns from female authors is 12.958 and male authors is 12.957.The data covers 12 years period from 2006 to 2017 and the corpus contains 18.164.832tokens.
The size of the data and the number of authors involved in the corpus puts the study to a different place form the previous studies for Turkish.Among the data crawled, we made a selection.The accuracy of the crawled webpage is the first criteria.This also let us to limit the sources with three websites.We also discard many columns in order to equalize the distribution among female and male authors.For each year, the number of columns added to corpus database is equal.

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Three sub-corpora was created for this study.

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A corpus of female authors covering 2014 and 2015 1 The corpus is available at https://tscorpus.com/corpora/ts-columns-corpus/  A corpus of male authors covering 2014 and 2015  A corpus of both male and female authors covering 2014 and 2015 The two sub-corpora contain 4.991 columns and the third contains 9.982 columns in total.The female sub-corpus contains 4.042.952and male sub-corpus contains 3.483.699words.
The distribution of the data via sources is as follows: The corpus stands on CQPWeb and CWB.We take advantage of CQPWeb for running queries with morphological annotation, part-of-speech tags and creating frequency and collocation list for each corpus.
The corpus also allows categorization of results, which we used for discourse and semantic analysis of the results manually.

Findings
The corpus interface allows us to generate frequency lists for each sub-corpus and compare them.We used this function in order to figure out the words with significantly different frequencies.The comparison of these "positive" and "negative" lists of the words put forward that female authors has more columns about life, travel, children, health, horoscope and art.
As the same lists generated for male authors, politics, economy and sport observed as the main plot of the columns.We used 7 different keywords peculiar to these categories.Table X represents the results we gained.The words child, baby, love and disabled are referring to the gender imputed to the women such as mother-ship and sensitivity, which are clearly more frequent at female authors columns.The frequency of otel and kalori is an indicator that female authors write more under the health and travel domains.
We should underline that we used lemma query option served by the corpus.A lemma query is generated by giving the root word in curly brackets.For instance, the query key {burun}1 will fetch every occurrences of the given word, even there is a sound change (drop, assimilation etc.) observed.This means.Every occurrence in any appearance of the word is calculated.
These results we gained from our corpus is almost identical with the measurements published by Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) at five years intervals, given in the table below.The word adam (man) refers to both man and mankind (human being).It is also used to talk about women as a human being, which shows the discrimination in language in the context of gender.
With the query keys "* adamı" and "* kadını", the results gained from the corpus puts forward the discrimination over the social representation of genders.
However, as we take advantage of the categorization feature of the corpus and categorize hits, we found that among 50 observation of the phrase "bilim adamı", 20 of them actually cover both men and woman.This is an indication of the appearance of masculine language used in columns.
The usage of the word "bayan" (lady/dame) instead of "kadın" (woman) in Turkish is the most criticized usage by gender and feminist studies.Because the word "bayan" does not only refer to sex but it is also for addressing.Therefore, when it is about sex, the word "woman" should be preferred.When the way that the columnists used the word "bayan" is questioned, it is observed that this word occurred 138 times (by author female 65, male 73) and the word "kadın" is observed 9950 times (by author female 7767, male 2183).
Yet, the sample sentences below put forward that the criticized usage is still out there.
1.a …bayanlar voleybol takımı (Women Volleyball Team) 1.b …bayanlar türbanlarını çıkarıp bikini giyecek.(Ladies will take off their hijab and wear bikinis) The samples 1.a and 1.b are samples for negative and criticized usage of this word We also come across that a female author used this word ironically.
The corpus we used has part-of-speech tagging and morphological annotations.This allowed us to generate queries upon morphological fixes.We used two personal endings, first singular and first plural markers to generate query keys.
For each marker, we first run a query questioning the occurrences of these markers and check the distribution among female and male authors.Then we observed 4 different verbs, sevmek (to love), korkmak (to afraid), kızmak (to be angry) and ağlamak (to cry) with these markers.
These differences of the occurrences for both first singular and first plural endings for these verbs are significant.Female authors used these words at least two times more with first person singular.It is obvious that, female authors used these verbs by involving themselves to the context more than male authors do.This results shows that female authors are more relax with representing their feelings than males.
Lakoff (1973) refers that certainty is feature of masculine language.Besides, he makes a comparison among masculine and feminine language and claims woman uses uncertain utterances and probability more than men.We checked his ideas by running queries that using the morphological features that add certainty to a verb in Turkish; copula and necessity markers The table above (table 6) is in harmony with his ideas.Certainty observed more in masculine language.
However, the tables below show that men use possibility more than women.But we should keep in mind that Lakoff's study stands on spoken language, not written.The adverbs belki (maybe) or galiba (I guess), which are referring possibility, are used more by male authors compared to females but again there is not a clear gap.Another interesting point is that, women try to prove their ideas by giving examples.In order to test this idea we run queries to find out the frequency of the words mesela (for example), örneğin (for instance) and misal (exemplar).The table below (table 9) shows the occurrences.

Results
The language used in the columns represents the authors and the newspaper ideology.According to the findings gained by the researches, the language use of the columnists in the scope of gender analyzed by corpus linguistics methods and the results listed below.
The very fist result of this study is the corpus we build.This corpus allows running queries, which is not possible to run manually, by means of the size of the data and the annotation and tagging is serves.Furthermore, despite other studies this dataset and the corpus is publicly and freely available to the scholars and researchers.
Most of the academic studies in this field in Turkey focused on the representation of women in Turkish media.The distinctive point of this study is to run a research where the women are also the producer of the language or in other words the subject of the data.
We stand on the columns as our dataset, which are reproducing the ideology.
We run our queries in the perspective of the gender.
We generated frequency lists for male and female authors.Using the positive and negative words and frequencies we found the diversifying categories.The gender roles generally attributed to women such as mother ship, sensitivity, and being emotional appeared in columns.Likewise, the keywords iktidar (political power) and spor (sports) are observed more frequent in the columns of male authors as expected.This means, content and news produced by media are still transmitting the traditional gender roles and stereo-types.
A criticized usage in gender studies is the usage of the word adam (man) as mentioned above.The occurrences of the "bilim adamı 1 " is 65 times by female and 48 times by male authors.However, the phrase "bilim insanı", which represents gender equality, used 147 times by female and 104 times by male authors.As columns is a language transmitter, we may say that, this usage contributes to the awareness to the gender equality.
Samples taken from the corpus show that the stereotype word choices are still active in the authors mind.
"…The most important business people, statemen and academics in Turkey…" And the sample below taken from female author.
"…siyasetçi, entellektüel ve iş insanlarını ağırlayan bir turizmci." "…the tourism professional who hosts politicians, intellectuals and business people…" Females are more sensitive at word choices than males.Even, the male author used iş insanı instead of iş adamı he is still not aware that the phrase devlet adamı is in the same category that is criticized.Many more samples can be reached from the corpus.This is the first corpus released in Turkish that fetches data from columns and serves the data with part-of-speech tags, morphological annotation and search criteria.This feature allowed us to run queries using morphological units with specific verbs.We believe, with this corpus, we served a tool and a dataset that will help to make different studies.
And finally, despite to all those studies, activist movements and campaigns trying o trigger the awareness about gender equality, the idealized media is still out of reach.

Table 1 .
The distribution of subcorpora according to sources and year.

Table 2 .
The distribution of the words.

Table 4 .
Queries for first person singular marker

Table 5 .
Queries for first person plural marker

Table 6 .
Queries for copula and necessity markers

Table 8 .
Queries for adverbs referring possibility