Irene Elmerot, foto: Petr Makovička

This compilation thesis takes a top-down, or bird’s eye, perspective on the representation of different groups of people in the Czech news press over three decades. The starting point is that equality is a global prerequisite for a democratic world, according to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. The research questions of the thesis concern how positively or negatively different groups of people are represented, and how often the different groups are represented. Moreover, the results of the thesis are based on a less frequently studied language, which in itself is a valuable contribution to the field of linguistic research.

– The thesis shows quantitatively what gender equality actually looks like between different occupational groups, nationalities and men and women, says Irene. Some people take it for granted, while others either don’t know or believe that the facts are different than they actually are. My thesis data ends in 2018, before the Covid-19 pandemic. With the World Economic Forum’s new post-pandemic study of gender equality and its deterioration as a background, my thesis can also serve as a basis for future research on similar issues. The thesis also covers only one country, the Czech Republic, and only the news press, so there is every reason to conduct new studies using other data.

Why did you focus on Czech?

– Ha ha, originally the reason was ice cream. In the 1990s I was in Prague and wanted ice cream, but the lady selling only ice cream in a “hole in the wall” didn’t understand what I was saying when I tried to pronounce the difficult word. Then I decided to study Czech, and now I can easily say the whole phrase “Dám si zmrzlinu, prosím”, that is, “I’ll have an ice cream, please.” But then I made friends there, and returned to the language over and over again. Then, when the theme Language and Power within The Doctoral School in the Humanities was about to start, Czech was the only participating language for which I was qualified.

What is it like to work with a corpus?

– It feels great to be able to handle such large amounts of data! Nowadays, there are many easy-to-use programmes and web portals that make it easier to investigate phenomena over time or across languages. As I put it at the last teachers’ conference, where I presented how to use corpora in language teaching, you need to be at least willing to learn some simple, computational techniques, but then you can get material that may be the basis for all kinds of research. I have convinced many colleagues – from art historians to historians and sociologists – that corpus linguistics is a great way to start the analytical part of a project.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of working with a corpus?

– The advantage is that you can get quantitative, quantity-based evidence for what you suspect – or counter-evidence, for that matter. Without the Czech National Corpus, roughly equivalent to the Swedish Språkbanken Text (there is no proper equivalent for the English language), it would have been difficult to cover three decades, and I would never have been able to cover as many nationalities or professions as I have now done in the thesis.
The disadvantage was not in the corpus, but in the limited selection of adjectives; I chose to limit myself to a special list, the “Subjectivity Lexicon for Czech”, and this meant that some common adjectives were not included. But then I have to do new research, so it’s not all bad!

Have you been rejected from any journal or conference during your work? A compilation thesis means that you must have submitted several articles before the defence.

– Yes, and I think it is important to emphasise that everyone gets rejected sometimes, and sometimes that’s a good thing, because the project or idea wasn’t up to scratch. But the hardest part is almost when I’ve got an editor who really cares: they then tinker with so many things that it feels like the revisions will never end. At the same time, I realise that the changes are often needed. Once, though, I had to ask my proofreader to write to the editor that the language was actually good, as he was a native speaker and experienced in that particular language genre and the editor was not.

Have you been surprised by anything during the work?

– Probably the biggest surprise came when I tried to match the gross national income groups with the adjectives. There are positively and negatively ranked adjectives in my data, and four income groups, from low to high. They matched perfectly: the higher the gross national income, the more favourable were the designations given to the countries. Then I had to triple-check my data, but it was right. That became Study I of the thesis.

Irene Elmerot’s defence will take place on 14 June 2024.

Photo from the "spikning" of Irene's thesis.

More information about the defence

Irene Elmerot's thesis in DiVA

Irene Elmerot's profile page