Real-World Sex-Role Stereotypes and Anaphor Resolution: Where is the real world and what newspapers do they read there?

Kate Joester

There is evidence that real-world information is used in anaphor resolution. Gernsbacher (1991), on conceptual plurality, and Garnham et al (1992), on implicit causality, have shown that world knowledge about lexical items can be the sole factor facilitating anaphor resolution. Garnham et al (1996) further showed that this effect was not limited to 'word meaning' information, but extends to sex-role stereotyping of occupation titles. However, the structure of such knowledge as it is accessed during reading has not been fully explored. Often the knowledge involved is so complex that we cannot readily distinguish which parts belong to our knowledge of words and which belong to our knowledge of events. Without this basic distinction, it is difficult to describe the form of the real-world knowledge, or to determine how it affects our reading of texts.

The first stage of my research uses the example of occupation titles which are strongly sex-role stereotyped to further examine the structure of the real-world information used while reading. By examining information from the 1991 census and the British National Corpus, a picture of the information which may build up sex role stereotypes can be obtained. Perhaps predictably, the strongly gendered occupations obtained from the census fall into strong themes (building workers, nannies and so on). However, the correlations between gendered occupations, class and frequency in the census, and their relationship to gendered references and frequency in the BNC demonstrate the complexity of stereotype information, and the potential it has for experimental investigation.