Lingua, genere e lavoro in Italia e in Germania: un'analisi comparativa su annunci di lavoro, sui corpora itWaC e deWaC e sulla stampa

This thesis explores gender, language and work in Italian and in German and it includes six chapters. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 provide the theoretical framework to the empirical part of this work, which appears in Chapter 4, 5 and 6. Chapter 3 contains a methodological premise. In chapter 1, I review the notion of †œgender and language†� in Italy and Germany. Chapter 2 illustrates how women operate within the labour market in Italy and Germany. Chapter 3 introduces some key notions, which are crucial to the three analyses, namely the concepts of corpus and corpus linguistics and those of discourse and discourse analysis. Chapter 4 marks the beginning of the empirical part of my work, namely the analysis of gender strategies in job advertisements in Italian and German. According to the initial hypothesis, these forms are supposed to be found in higher numbers in German advertisements since the theme †œgender and language†� has drawn more attention in Germany rather than Italy. The results confirm the initial hypothesis, although strategies of feminisation are still rare in Italian as in German. Chapter 5 features the analysis of the usage of feminine and masculine job-titles in two reference corpora. According to the initial hypothesis, feminine role names are still characterised by semantical asymmetries compared to the masculine equivalents. The results show that the initial hypothesis is confirmed only for Italian. Chapter 6 analyses the discourse †œwomen and work†� in the Italian and German press. The object of the analysis consists in investigating four corpora of newspaper articles about the discourse †œwomen and work†�. The results show that the prominent topic within the discourse †œwomen and work†� in German press is the gender pay gap, whereas the topic of women's (un)employment prevails in the Italian press.