| Summary: | Frequent lexical patterns can explain how language, society and culture interact. In this paper, we analyze the most frequent adjectival collocates which precede lemmas WOMAN and MAN, by searching the node words woman, women, man and men in the British National Corpus (BNC) using the statistical procedure list. The primary postulate is that frequent collocational patterns reveal common societal and cultural concepts. The research is based on Sinclair’s theory about how frequency points to what is typical and central in a language (17). Furthermore, Stubbs’s understanding of a community’s value system being built up and maintained by the recurrent use of particular phrasings in texts (Words and Phrases 166) is explored through the repetition of lexical patterns in the corpus, thus exposing dominant cultural models. Keywords: WOMAN, MAN, BNC, frequency, collocates, language, society, cultureMichael Stubbs’s principle that “language in use transmits the culture,” by which he provides his understanding of the relations between form and meaning (Text 43), is a good foundation for the study of the frequency of words by means of electronic corpora. Since meaning is language in use, electronic corpora facilitate just that – an analysis of raw, unaltered data, as clearly stated by Stubbs’s second principle concerning language being studied in “actual, attested, authentic instances of use” (Text 28).
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