A corpus-driven study on the representation of marriage between 1950s and 2000s in COHA

Abstract

This paper investigates how marriage is represented in the 1950s and the 2000s respectively and how the perception of it has changed between the two periods over time through the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). Adjective collocates of marriage were retrieved for investigating the representation, and both adjective and noun collocates were extracted for studying the perception changes. By exploring those collocates of marriage in the concordance lines, the analysis discussed the way of people in the West viewing marriage in two ways: personal and social. In terms of sketching the image of the state of marriage, there were dichotomic modifiers. Moreover, it seemed that marriage is not only a personal affair but also it needs to be socially recognized. In case of attention shifts of marriage between the two periods, it appeared more to be a social issue due to the controversy of homosexual marriage along with other social problems.