Stereotypes of women's perception in the XX-XXI century English studies: contradictions and subjectivity

The relevance of this work is determined by the identified issues aimed at studying the role of language stereotypes in the construction of the image of a woman rooted in general social and cultural practice of native English speakers. The purpose of this article is to analyze the gender stereotype as an object of linguistic and cognitive research, to summarize the principles and results of studies of gender stereotypes in the English studies, as well as to assess the impact of stereotypical thinking on a woman’s perception. In accordance with the goals set in this article, we summarize the works of a number of foreign scholars on gender stereotypes, reconstruct the overview of the problem with the help of their comparative analysis. We also attempt to prove the inconsistency and bias of the stereotypical perception of women in the English language by singling out pairs of antonymic stereotypical female and male qualities noted by various researchers at different times. Proving the inconsistency and bias of stereotyped perception, we also rely on the combined results of the previous semantic analysis of attributive-nominative phrases with the core lexeme “woman” and a similar analysis with the lexeme “girl” presented in this article. We also take into account the semantic analysis of secondary nomination units expressing the stereotypical prototypical qualities of a woman. The study is based on the texts of the British National Corpus of the English language and a selection of examples from authoritative lexicographic sources.