Female voices in horror : A linguistic study of female stereotyping in two slasher movies

Sammanfattning: This study sets out to investigate the extent to which slasher movies can be said to carry out linguistic female stereotyping in their portrayal of female characters. It has been proposed (cf. Coates 1993)that female speech is often associated with politeness, tentativeness, talkativeness and weaker expressions in comparison with men, descending from a female subculture (Graddol & Swann 1989: 90). Considering this, a stereotypical profile was created, consisting of linguistic features such as hedges, questions, expletives, empty adjectives and verbosity, through which the former characteristics may be manifested. The stereotypical profile was then applied to the corpus consisting of the transcripts of the two slasher movies "Halloween" and "I Know What You Did Last Summer". Evidence of all linguistic features mentioned above was found in the corpus, and the female characters' use of these features did match, to a considerable extent, the stereotypical profile. Keywords: linguistics, female stereotyping, gender, horror