Department of Humanities and Social sciences
“Authoritative” or ”Neurotic”
A Study of Adjectival Descriptions of the Three
Main Characters in Bridget Jones's
Diary,with Special Reference to Gender
Differences
Linnea Wirgell
May 2009
English C 15 credits
English linguistics
English C
Table of Contents
Table of Contents ... 2
1 Introduction ... 3
1.1 Aim and Scope ... 3
1.2 Previous Research ... 4 2 Method ... 6 2.1 Material ... 6 2.2 Data ... 7 2.3 Method of Analysis ... 10 2.4 Hypotheses ... 14 3 Results ... 15 3.1 Frequencies ... 16 3.2 Connotations ... 16 3.3 Categories ... 17
3.4 Connotations and Semantic Categories Combined ... 19
4 Summary and Conclusion ... 21
References ... 24
1 Introduction
1.1 Aim and Scope
The area of sociolinguistics has a great many subfields. One is to connect language with the extralinguistic factor of gender and this is what the present study will do. My approach within this subfield is to compare and contrast the manner in which female and male characters in a certain novel are described. This essay will connect gender differences to language by comparing adjectival descriptions of the three main characters in Helen Fielding’s novel Bridget Jones’s Diary, originally published in 1996. It needs to be emphasised that my study is a case study of one particular novel and no safe generalisations about women and men in general can be made from it.
The primary material for this study is thus the novel Bridget Jones's Diary (Fielding 2001). The reason for my choice is that contemporary values may be reflected in contemporary novels and therefore it can be of interest to study fictional descriptions of women and men. The novel is set in fairly-modern-day London. This setting adds to its value since I wish to study the phenomenon of adjectival description in a contemporary source. Furthermore, this novel, its sequel and the two films made based on these were all highly appreciated and popular. By the year 2006, this novel about Bridget Jones had sold more than 2 million copies and its sequel more than 1.5 million (Memmot 2006). This fact is also a reason for analysing this specific novel as it says something about what is accepted and welcomed in present-day society.
The aim of this study is to investigate whether a difference can be detected in descriptions of the three main characters of the novel. These are the protagonist Bridget Jones and two of the men in her life: Mark Darcy and Daniel Cleaver. My two research questions are:
• Does Bridget Jones describe herself differently than she describes Mark Darcy and Daniel Cleaver?
• Does Bridget Jones describe Mark Darcy and Daniel Cleaver differently?
seems to have a greater effect on the results.
The scope of my essay includes all adjectives describing Daniel Cleaver and Mark Darcy from the novel's 310 pages. These pages are divided into twelve chapters corresponding to twelve months. The novel has the form of a diary and it thus covers one year of Bridget’s life. The adjectives describing Bridget were extracted from January through April and November through December, 166 pages in total. Since it is Bridget Jones’s diary, there are obviously more
descriptions of her than of any other person. This is why it proved necessary to leave out a number of months from the collection of data on Bridget Jones.
1.2 Previous Research
In the field of sociolinguistics there are a great many relevant and interesting factors. The extralinguistic factor of gender is quite new in research. “It is only relatively recently that
sociolinguists have turned their attention to gender”, but thanks to “the explosion of research in the field of language and gender” (Coates 2004:3-4) during the last two decades there are quite a large number of studies that have been made from this perspective. The area is developing fast. Studies of adjectival descriptions from a gender perspective have been carried out several times in previous research.
Hene's (1984) investigation of adjectives describing characters in juvenile literature has come to be the basis for many other studies. She put together a semantic framework for categorising adjectives to help her in her investigation. This categorisation system is based on different
Table 1. Hene's (1984:251) summary of stereotypical gender-specific qualities.
Girls/Women Boys/Men
Emotional Rational
Gentle Aggressive
Passive Active
Family oriented Profession oriented People minded Object minded Appearance oriented Character oriented
Hene's research is based on the dichotomies displayed in Table 1. She wanted to study whether these agreed with the descriptions in the books so an investigation was made of how girls/ women and boys/men were described in children's books (divided into special boys' books and girls' books). However, she found that the gender roles in children's books are less traditional than
anticipated. Still, adjectives concerning employment and economic status have a higher percentage in descriptions of boys. It was the adjectives in the Interpersonal subcategory of Situation which demonstrated the clearest traditional pattern. This subcategory contains adjectives describing a person's profession, finances and relationships (for more information on the subcategories, see subsection 2.3). In Hene's (1984) study, boys/men were described more in terms of professional life and economy (Hene 1984:254) than were the girls. These results match the characteristics in Table 1.
Bäcklund (2006) carried out a corpus-based investigation on adjectival descriptions of women and men in 19th century English. The data was extracted from drama and fiction as well as from private letters and was classified partially according to the model established by Hene (1984). Bäcklund’s aim was to study whether changes in the social situation (of women in particular) throughout the 19th century were reflected also in the manner in which a person was described (Bäcklund 2006:18). She concludes that “the descriptions of women and girls towards the end of the century might reflect a stronger and more important role for women than earlier in the century; sociocultural changes such as the increasing presence of women in society, on councils and at universities may lie behind these tendencies in the data” (Bäcklund 2006:53).
contemporary times. Sveen’s aim was to study and compare these descriptions and she asked the questions: What aspects are described? and: How? (Sveen 2005:17). She hypothesised that she would find a difference between Victorian and contemporary fiction and that Victorian English would contain more positive descriptions. What is more relevant to this essay is that Sveen also hypothesised that in descriptions of female characters the main focus would be on external qualities whereas a male character would rather be described in terms of his mental qualities (Sveen
2005:17-19).
Sveen's results supported her hypotheses and the most remarkable result was the diachronic change in descriptions of women’s mentality. The percentage of adjectival descriptions regarding a woman's mentality increased from 16% in Victorian times to 37% in the contemporary material. According to Sveen these results reflect “a change in the societal attitude, namely that mental properties were considered to be features as important to attribute to female as to male characters in the contemporary material, in contrast to the Victorian material, in which mental qualities were considered of little importance to attribute to female characters” (Sveen 2005:160). The results of Hene’s (1984), Bäcklund’s (2006) and Sveen’s (2005) studies will be further addressed in section 3 together with the results of my study.
Franzon (2005) and Åström (2004) both investigated adjectival descriptions in relation to gender. However, there are differences between the two. Franzon's (2005) essay addressed Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair and the difference in descriptions of the two in an encyclopaedia. Åström (2004), on the other hand, focused on adjectives describing female and male characters in British and New Zealand English. This study is corpus-based. To summarise the results, Åström obtained results which pointed to a gender difference in the descriptions while Franzon discovered no major variation.
2 Method
2.1 Material
sex, food, family, cigarettes, work, her weight and the search for true love. Bridget dates her boss Daniel Cleaver for a number of months. However, after having discovered him with another woman, she returns to being single. Mark Darcy is the son of Bridget’s parents’ friends and is compared to the character of Mr. Darcy from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice several times. Bridget does not at all like him at the beginning of the book. However, as time goes by, Mark Darcy proves himself worthy of Bridget’s affection. It is the adjectival descriptions of these three
characters, which have been collected from the material, that form the basis of the present study. A possible limitation with this specific choice of material is the fact that the novel was published in 1996. That is, it was published thirteen years ago and will therefore not give a perfect indication as to what modern speech would be like in this regard. Perhaps there has been a change in the use of adjectives during these years. My decision to sample adjectival descriptions about Bridget only from certain chapters, which is discussed in subsection 1.1, could also be considered a limitation regarding the data collection.
2.2 Data
In order to sample the data from the material, I read the novel a total of three times and underlined the relevant adjectives. The data obtained was then divided into three categories based on whom a sampled adjective describes. These three categories are obviously Bridget Jones, Mark Darcy and Daniel Cleaver. All adjectives describing one of these three characters from the relevant parts of the novel were extracted for analysis.
An adjective is identified based on four criteria (Quirk et al. 1985:402-403). Now follow a list of these criteria and an example of each. The exemplified adjective has been italicised.
1. An adjective can take attributive function
An adjective can serve as a premodifier in a noun phrase, as in (1). The noun described has been underlined.
An adjective can function as the head of a subject complement as in (2) or of an object complement. The pronoun described has been underlined.
(2) How dare you be so fraudulently flirtatious, cowardly and dysfunctional? (Fielding 2001:33)
3. An adjective can be premodified by the intensifier very as in (3), where V stands for very. (3) V. tired. (Fielding 2001:57)
4. An adjective can take the comparative/superlative forms -er/-est or more/most as in examples (4) and (5). As (5) shows, participial adjectives were included in the study. (4) I don't look fatter. (Fielding 2001:74)
(5) Made me even more depressed. (Fielding 2001:194)
In the previous studies presented in subsection 1.2, categories such as attributive and predicative adjectives have been carefully separated. These studies included adjectives in the attributive position only. However, after studying the primary material I found that in order to obtain a large enough amount of data, I would have to be less strict in sampling the adjectives. The reason for my choosing this solution sprung from my belief that the result would be more reliable if it was based on a higher number of examples. This decision led to the inclusion of several cases that have not been considered relevant in the earlier studies. Hence, in this study all adjectives that describe one of the three characters (in the relevant sections of the material) have been included in the data. Straightforward examples with attributive function followed by a noun as in (6) and (7) and with predicative function, for example following the verb be as in (8), have been included along with less clear examples.
(8) I expected Daniel to at least be sympathetic. (Fielding 2001:166)
Adjectives describing one of the three characters that are neither followed nor preceded by a proper noun (e.g. Daniel), a pronoun (e.g. he) or a common noun (e.g. boyfriend) with a clear gender association are also included. An example from this category is displayed in (9), where Bridget describes herself as being late, without a pronoun which would tell the reader directly of whom she is talking. The V. stands for Very. It is the context that provides the possibility of categorising these adjectival descriptions. In cases where it is not clear whom an adjective describes, it has been excluded.
(9) V. late now (Fielding 2001:93)
Furthermore, the samples include all forms of comparison, that is, the positive, comparative and
superlative. No distinction has been made between these. In cases where the same adjective is
repeated in two sentences appearing near one another, as in (10), all occurrences have been counted.
(10) Gorgeous, messy, sexy, exciting, hilarious Daniel ...
Exciting? Wild? Hilarious? Huh. (Fielding 2001:298)
In cases where an adjective describes several people, as in (11), it has been regarded as a description of all the relevant characters, in this case Mark Darcy and Daniel. That is, sodding has been counted twice, once for Darcy and once for Cleaver.
(11) (sodding Una Alconbury, Mark Darcy, Daniel, Mum, everybody) (Fielding 2001:167)
2.3 Method of Analysis
The adjectives extracted from the material have been categorised according to both connotations and semantic categories. The semantic categorisation system used by Hene (1984), which was mentioned in subsection 1.2, has been simplified and adjusted to suit the needs of this specific study. The system is complex and has various levels. The two main categories are the Intrapersonal and the Interpersonal (Bäcklund 2006:20-24). The first main category includes adjectives that describe a person as an individual, without regard to society or relationships to other people. When used by Hene (1984) this model was a great deal more complex than it is in this study. Due to time and space limitations it was not possible to keep its high level of detail. When used by Hene (1984) the two main categories of the semantic categorisation system had 15 subcategories. However, when Bäcklund (2006) used Hene's (1984) system, she conflated these 15 subcategories into 9. With the exception that Bäcklund's Intrapersonal subcategory of Nationality was excluded as it was not interesting for the present study, Bäcklund's is the system I have used.
The subcategories of the Intrapersonal main category in this essay are the following: Ability, Age, Appearance, Mental state and Physical state. The category of Age is quite straight-forward and will not be addressed here while the other four will be explained and exemplified. All adjectives in the examples are included in the scope; however, only the adjective relevant to that specific
example has been italicised.
The Intrapersonal subcategory of Ability includes adjectives describing a person's skills and knowledge, acquired as well as innate. In (12) there two examples from the Ability subcategory. Adjectives that belong to the subcategory of Appearance are those describing a person's looks, e.g. haircut, clothes and body type. Examples from this category are fat (13), naked (14) and tall (15).
(12) ..realizing for the first time what an intensely instinctive and intuitive person I am. (Fielding 2001:262)
(13) 'I can't stand Gladiators, though. It makes me feel fat,' I said. (Fielding 2001:103) (14) Daniel was standing stark naked in the doorway. (Fielding 2001:164)
Appearance is not to be confused with Physical state, which includes adjectives that rather describe a person's health and physical needs/states. The two examples pissed (16) and tired (17) both belong in this subcategory.
(16) Not to get too pissed. (Fielding 2001: 97)
(17) He looked tired yet fresh-faced, clean-shaven and very neat in his suit. (Fielding 2001:127) Finally, in the subcategory of Mental state are adjectives that describe a person's mentality and moodsuch as sad (18), furious (19) and smart (20).
(18) It is far too late for Daniel to ring. V. sad... (Fielding 2001:28) (19) Oh God. Daniel has not replied. Must be furious. (Fielding 2001:23)
(20) He's really v. sweet, Mark Darcy, as well as being rocky smart. (Fielding 2001:305)
The Interpersonal main category has three subcategories, namely Address, Situation and Sociability. Address is further divided into Address and Attitude where the adjectives included in Attitude express the speaker's/writer's personal feelings about the person described. The
subcategory of Address on the other hand contains adjectives that are used in terms of address. Belonging to the subcategory of Attitude are the examples bloody (21) and poor (22). An example from the subcategory of Address is the term dear (23) which is extracted from a letter written by Bridget to Mark Darcy.
(21) It was bloody Mark Darcy trying to wreck my relationship by sowing suspicions in my mind. (Fielding 2001:177)
The Interpersonal subcategory of Situation contains adjectives defining a person's social, familial, financial or work-related situation. Examples from this category are the adjectives single (24) and rich (25).
(24) ...congratulating myself on being single. (Fielding 2001:71)
(25) ...going on about how rich and marvellous he was. Ugh. (Fielding 2001:194) The final Interpersonal subcategory is that of Sociability and it contains adjectives
describing a person's attitudes and behaviour. It is important to remember the difference between this subcategory and that of Mental state. Due to the fact that they belong to different main categories, namely Intrapersonal and Interpersonal, the emphasis is on whether the described characteristic determines the person as an individual or in interaction with others (Bäcklund 2006:21). The Intrapersonal subcategory of Mental state includes adjectives that describe a person in isolation while the Interpersonal subcategory of Sociability contains adjectives describing a person in interaction. Examples of the latter subcategory are friendly and professional in (26), nice and good in (27) and flirtatious in (28).
(26) ...just be friendly and professional to Matt... (Fielding 2001:294) (27) V. nice good person. Too good for me, evidently. (Fielding 2001:296) (28) How dare you be so fraudulently flirtatious... (Fielding 2001:33)
(29) Anyway, completely safe option as no way diamond-pattern-jumpered goody-goody would have read five-hundred page feminist treatise. (Fielding 2001:14)
(30) ...as if I were a very glamorous, important person. (Fielding 2001:73) (31) Daniel was standing stark naked in the doorway. (Fielding 2001:164)
Another aspect of the classification model that is worth mentioning is the matter of adjectives preceded by or including a negation, as in (32) and (33). Decisions regarding
connotations have been made with the negation included as part of the analysis. The negations in the examples have been underlined.
(32) ...I am not common nor incompetent. (Fielding 2001:256) (33) Oh, why am I so unattractive? (Fielding 2001:16)
This manner of classifying according to connotations leads to the possibility that almost any adjective can belong to any connotational category based on its contextual meaning. That is, there is no objective decision to be made only from looking at the adjective. The classification of both connotations and semantic categories is subjective and other scholars may reach results that differ from mine. Examples of the idea that every case in the classification process is contextually interpreted are displayed in (32) and (34). The adjectives (with negations) are not common, nor
incompetent, normal and no different and although they do not seem to be similar regarding
connotations, owing to their contextual meanings I have classified them into the same category, that is, they all have positive connotations.
(34) I am normal and no different from everyone else. (Fielding 2001:258)
2.4 Hypotheses
The hypotheses in the present study are based mainly on previous research. As was concluded in Hene (1984), matters such as employment and economic status described by adjectives belonging to the Interpersonal category of Situation were much more common in descriptions of boys/men than of girls/women (Hene 1984:254). In Bäcklund's (2006) study it was shown that females were more often described with adjectives belonging to the Intrapersonal subcategory of Appearance than were men (2006:28). On the other hand, men were frequently described in terms of Situation (Bäcklund 2006:52). Hence, my hypothesis is that compared to Cleaver and Darcy, Bridget Jones will be described more in terms of Appearance. Furthermore, it is also expected that Cleaver and Darcy will be described more in terms of their Situation. Both of these hypotheses are connected to my first research question, which asks if there is a difference in the descriptions of Bridget Jones compared to those of Cleaver and Darcy.
Sveen (2005) found that in Victorian times it was not considered important to talk about a woman's mental state, hence there were fewer adjectives belonging to this category found in the Victorian material than in the contemporary material (Sveen 2005:160-161). Since the material for the present study is a novel in the form of a diary, not a children's book, the results can be expected to differ somewhat from Sveen's. Something which could be interpreted as signalling the opposite result to what Sveen (2005) found regarding Mental state is the following quote: “...negative thoughts: approx. 445 per hour, positive thoughts 0” (Fielding 2001:184). In this passage Bridget is writing about herself and the fact that she is rather depressed. Bridget does this quite a lot. The adjective depressed certainly belongs to the category of Mental state. Therefore I hypothesise that Bridget Jones will be described with adjectives belonging to the subcategory of Mental state more frequently than will the men. Hence, although Bridget Jones is female, she can be expected to differ from the female characters covered by Sveen (2005).
negative connotations than with positive ones. Descriptions of Cleaver with regard to connotations are expected to have roughly the same number of positive and negative connotations. The reason for this expectation is that Bridget's attitude towards Cleaver varies throughout the novel. The
relationship Bridget has with Daniel Cleaver is based on physical attraction rather than on true love and therefore I hypothesise that the adjectives describing Cleaver's Appearance will display a higher percentage of positive connotations and the adjectives describing his Sociability a higher percentage of negative connotations. When comparing the descriptions of Cleaver's appearance to those of Darcy's, I hypothesise that Darcy's looks will be described with more adjectives with negative connotations than with positive connotations. The reason for my expectation is, once again, that Bridget does not at all like Darcy until the very end of the novel. Hence, she will not like his looks either. This fact will probably also affect the adjectives in the subcategory of Sociability, which will presumably more often have negative connotations.
A final hypothesis is that, based on the quote earlier in subsection 2.4, Bridget will, in general, be more negative towards herself than towards the men. The following quote demonstrates Bridget's low self esteem and her depressive nature: “Oh God, I'm so depressed. I thought I'd found something I was good at for once and now it's all ruined, and on top of everything else it is the horrible ruby wedding party on Saturday and I have nothing to wear. I'm no good at anything. Not men. Not social skills. Not work. Nothing” (Fielding 2001:224). This negative attitude will most likely peak in the subcategories of Mental state, Appearance, Sociability and Situation, as these adjectives touch on topics that are discussed several times in her diary, as in the quote above.
In section 3 I will discuss whether the results of the present study matched my hypotheses regarding the expected differences in descriptions of the three characters.
3 Results
3.1 Frequencies
The overall frequency of adjectives included in the present study is displayed in Table 2. The
difference between the three characters is quite large. One can easily explain this by stating that it is in fact Bridget Jones's diary, hence it contains more descriptions of her than of the men. The
difference in the overall frequency between the men is quite small and does not seem to make a great difference in the analysis of this part of the data.
Table 2. Frequencies of adjectives/page describing each character.
Adjectives Pages Adjectives/page
Bridget Jones 155 166 0.90
Mark Darcy 49 307 0.16
Daniel Cleaver 63 307 0.20
3.2 Connotations
In the overall calculation of positive, neutral and negative connotations of the adjectives, it was found that Bridget Jones is far more critical of and negative towards her own qualities than she is towards the men. As displayed in Table 3, 59% of all descriptions of Bridget have negative connotations, corresponding to 36% for Cleaver and 45% for Darcy.
Table 3. Adjectives according to character and connotations.
Connotation Bridget Jones Daniel Cleaver Mark Darcy Total
Negative 91 (59%) 23 (36%) 22 (45%) 136
Positive 53 (34%) 35 (56%) 22 (45%) 110
Neutral 11 (7%) 5 (8%) 5 (10%) 21
Total 155 63 49 267
for this could be that when she realises she is in fact in love with Darcy, he is all she writes about. This hypothesised explanation is supported to a certain extent by the fact that the frequency of adjectives describing Darcy is 13 (27%) in the first half of the book and 36 (73%) in the final half of the book. However, when divided according to connotations, it is displayed that there are not more adjectives with positive connotations in the end than in the beginning. The adjectives with negative connotations and those with positive connotations seem to be distributed equally across the entire novel.
3.3 Categories
The next step in section 3 is to return to the semantic categories presented in 2.3 and display the results obtained in this regard. Table 4 displays the results obtained for the two semantic main categories of Intrapersonal and Interpersonal for each character.
Table 4. Adjectives according to characters and Intrapersonal and Interpersonal categories. Semantic Category Bridget Jones Daniel Cleaver Mark Darcy Total Intrapersonal 97 (63%) 28 (44%) 15 (31%) 140 Interpersonal 58 (37%) 35 (56%) 34 (69%) 127
Total 155 63 49 267
The overall distribution of adjectives regarding their semantic categorisation demonstrates that the adjectives describing Bridget are more often in the Intrapersonal main category than in the
two categories was quite small.
Table 5 displays the distribution of adjectives across the different subcategories for each character.
Table 5. Adjectives according to character and subcategory.
Bridget Jones Daniel Cleaver Mark Darcy Intrapersonal Ability 4 (3%) 1 (2%) 1 (2%) Intrapersonal Age 2(1%) 0(0%) 0(0%) Intrapersonal Appearance 11 (7%) 16 (25%) 9 (18%) Intrapersonal Mental State 56 (36%) 6 (10%) 5 (10%) Intrapersonal Physical State 24(15%) 5(8%) 0(0%) Interpersonal Address-Address 0(0%) 0(0%) 1(2%) Interpersonal Address-Attitude 7 (5%) 7 (11%) 8 (16%) Interpersonal Situation 21 (14%) 3 (5%) 6 (12%) Interpersonal Sociability 30(19%) 25(39%) 19(39%) Total 155 63 49
What is most striking about these results is the high percentage in the subcategory of Sociability for the men. With 39% each, this is the category with most examples for Darcy and Cleaver. One of my hypotheses, based on Bäcklund's (2006) results, was that the two men would be described more in terms of their Situation than would Bridget. According to Table 5, this was not at all true for Cleaver, whose percentage in this subcategory was only 5%. Darcy seems to have been described somewhat more often in terms of Situation, with 12%, but it is in fact Bridget who has the highest percentage in this specific subcategory: 14% of the adjectives describing Bridget Jones concerned her Situation. Hence, the results of the present study were quite the opposite of Bäcklund's (2006). Whether this points to a difference regarding descriptions of women between the 19th century and
amount of data is comparatively small in this subcategory. A larger amount of data would obviously enable more certain conclusions.
The hypothesis regarding Mental state, that is, that Bridget Jones would be described more often regarding her mentality, was supported by the results. Bridget was described in terms of her mentality in 36% of the instances while Darcy and Cleaver reached a percentage of 10% each in this subcategory.
Bäcklund (2006) stated that women are generally more often described in terms of
Appearance than are men. The question is whether this is really true also for the main characters in
Bridget Jones's Diary since it is narrated from a female perspective. Table 5 shows that surprisingly
few adjectives describing Bridget Jones belonged to the Appearance subcategory. Only 7% of the adjectival descriptions of Bridget Jones concern her looks. What is completely opposite to what was found in previous research, by Bäcklund (2006) as well as by Sveen (2005), is that both the men had a higher percentage than Bridget in this subcategory. This somewhat surprising result can probably be linked to the fact that the novel is written from Bridget's perspective. She is, at one time or another, attracted to both these men and she does review their looks several times. The difference in the nature of her relationships with the two men is probably also mirrored in the results regarding the men's Appearance. As was suggested in subsection 2.4, Bridget's relationship to Cleaver is based mostly on physical attraction and will thus affect the results in this matter. Bridget's relationship with Darcy does not develop until the end of the novel and is then a story of true love. This will most likely also affect the results.
3.4 Connotations and Semantic Categories Combined
This subsection begins with Table 6 which includes the semantic categories, with their
Table 6. Adjectives according to semantic categories and connotations.
Bridget Jones Daniel Cleaver Mark Darcy
+ 0 - Total + 0 - Total + 0 - Total
Intrapersonal Ability 4100 % -- -- 4 1 100 % -- -- 1 -- -- 1 100 % 1 Intrapersonal Age 2 100 % -- -- 2 -- -- -- 0 -- -- -- 0 Intrapersonal Appearance 327% 19% 764% 11 1169% 12%2 319% 16 333% 333% 333% 9 Intrapersonal Mental state 14 25% 1 2% 41 73% 56 2 33% 1 17% 3 50% 6 1 20% 1 20% 3 60% 5 Intrapersonal Physical state 1 4% 3 13% 20 83% 24 -- 2 40% 3 60% 5 -- -- -- 0 Interpersonal Address-Address -- -- -- 0 -- -- -- 0 1 100 % -- -- 0 Interpersonal Address-Attitude 5 71% -- 2 29% 7 -- -- 7 100 % 7 2 25% -- 6 75% 8 Interpersonal Situation 1257% 210% 733% 21 267% -- 133% 3 350% 117% 233% 6 Interpersonal Sociability 13 43% 4 13% 13 43% 30 19 76% -- 6 24% 25 12 63% -- 7 37% 19 Total 54 35% 11 7% 90 58% 155 35 56% 5 8% 23 37% 63 22 45% 5 10% 22 45% 49
In Table 6 it is displayed that regarding the adjectives describing Appearance, the percentage of adjectives with negative connotations is twice as high for Bridget as for Darcy and about three times as high as for Cleaver. These results support the last hypothesis presented in subsection 2.4, where I anticipated that Bridget would be more critical of her own looks than of the men's. The
subcategories that were also expected to include more adjectives with negative connotations than with positive connotations about Bridget were Mental state, Sociability and Situation. The results for the subcategory of Mental state confirm that Bridget is described with adjectives with negative connotations in 73% of the cases, corresponding to 50% of the cases for Cleaver and 60% of the cases for Darcy. Hence, although with a rather small difference and based on a rather small amount of data, the hypothesis regarding Bridget's negativity towards herself is confirmed in this
Appearance and Mental state, that is, out of the three characters, it is Bridget who is most frequently described with adjectives with negative connotations. The character with the highest percentage of adjectives with positive connotations describing Sociability is Daniel Cleaver. The subcategory of Situation, which is included based on the quote in subsection 2.4 about how Bridget is no good at anything, contains 33% adjectives with negative connotations for each character.
In subsection 2.4 I hypothesised that, regarding Daniel Cleaver, the subcategory of Appearance would contain more adjectives with positive connotations than with negative. As is shown in Table 6, 69% of all the descriptions of Cleaver's looks have positive connotations, which matches what was anticipated. The subcategory of Sociability was expected to contain more adjectives with negative connotations describing Daniel Cleaver than adjectives with positive connotations. However, this was not at all supported by the results. 76% of the descriptions of Cleaver's Sociability have positive connotations and only 24% have negative connotations. Regarding Sociability for Darcy, it was anticipated that he would more often be described with adjectives with negative connotations than with positive connotations. Table 6 displays results that go against my hypothesis in this case as well. Only 37% of the adjectives in this subcategory have negative connotations. On the other hand, as many as 63% of the adjectives are positive.
Another hypothesis regarding Mark Darcy was that his looks, i.e. the subcategory of Appearance, would more often be described with adjectives with negative connotations than with positive. However, with 33% in each connotational category, Darcy's looks were described equally positively, neutrally and negatively. What needs to be pointed out here, again, is the small amount of data in the specific subcategory. Only 9 adjectives describing Darcy's Appearance were found in the material; obviously it is difficult to draw secure conclusions from this small amount of data.
4 Summary and Conclusion
adjectives describing Bridget Jones were extracted from chapters 1-4 and 11-12. The reason for this was that overall, the novel contained more descriptions of Bridget Jones than of the two male characters included in the study. In spite of this restriction on sampling the adjectives, the total number of adjectives was 155 for Bridget Jones but only 65 for Cleaver and 49 for Darcy.
The research questions in subsection 1.1 asked whether Bridget Jones described herself differently compared to Darcy and Cleaver, and whether the two men were described differently compared to each other. It was found that there were differences in the descriptions of the three. However, the hypotheses presented in subsection 2.4 were not supported by the obtained results in all cases.
Regarding connotations, it was found that Bridget was described with adjectives with negative connotations to a higher extent than were Darcy and Cleaver. This result matched my hypothesis.
Results concerning the semantic categorisation system introduced in subsection 2.3 were presented in 3.3. The overall calculation of the two main categories of Intrapersonal and
Interpersonal confirmed that there was a clear difference between the characters in this respect. The difference was gender specific. Bridget had a proportion of 63% in the Intrapersonal main category. Cleaver and Darcy on the other hand, had higher percentages in the Interpersonal main category. The proposed explanation for this was the fact that Bridget narrates the novel in the first person; hence, she described herself as an individual but Cleaver and Darcy as part of a social context.
My hypothesis, based on Bäcklund (2006), that the men would more often be described in terms of Interpersonal Situation was not at all supported by the results. In contrast, it was
demonstrated that the person with the highest percentage in this subcategory was in fact Bridget. This was completely opposite to what has been found in previous research.
The Intrapersonal subcategory of Mental state included more descriptions of Bridget Jones than of the men. These results confirmed what was anticipated in this respect. As was demonstrated in Table 4, the ratio of descriptions of Mental state regarding Bridget Jones reached 36% but only 10% for the two men. A subcategory in which Cleaver and Darcy had higher percentages of adjectives than Bridget Jones, on the other hand, was that of Intrapersonal Appearance. This result is completely opposite from what Bäcklund (2006) and Sveen (2005) found. A possible explanation for this is that it is a novel written in the first person, narrated from Bridget’s point of view.
negatively regarding her looks than were Cleaver and Darcy. In the Intrapersonal subcategory of Mental state, it was also confirmed that the ratio of negative descriptions peaked among the descriptions of Bridget.
Some of the results found in this study correspond well to those from previous research. However, there are results that are completely opposite to what other researchers have found. The reason for this is difficult to establish but since the primary material for this study was quite different from that used in previous research, this may be a possible explanation. This novel is modern, belongs to the genre of chick-lit (literature for women), and is in the form of a diary, hence written in the first person. These are factors that can have an effect on the final result. What is most important in this respect is to emphasise that this is one case study of three particular characters in one particular novel and no safe generalisations can be drawn from it.
Finally, suggestions for further research could be to apply the same method as was used in the present study to another novel. This novel's sequel could also be investigated to see whether a change has occurred regarding the adjectival descriptions of the two men, who are part of the second book as well. The matter of gender differences in adjectival descriptions could be
References
Primary Source
Fielding, H. 2001. Bridget Jones's Diary. London: Picador. Secondary Sources
Åström, K. 2004. Adjectives Describing Female and Male Characters – a Comparison between
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Bäcklund, I. 2006. Describing 19th Century Women and Men: An Analysis of Modifiers. In Kytö,
M., Rydén, M., and Smitterberg, E. (eds.). Nineteenth-Century English: Stability and
Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 17-55.
Coates, J. 2004. Women, Men and Language. 3rd edn. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.
Franzon, C. 2005. What is the Difference between Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair? A Study of
Adjectives in an Encyclopaedia Describing Two British Prime Ministers. C-essay 2005:6.
Gävle: University of Gävle.
Hene, B. 1984. Den dyrkade Lasse och Stackars Lilla Lotta. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Memmot, C. In Usa Today online. <
http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2006-06-20-chick-lit_x.htm>. [Accessed on 16 January 2009.]
Sveen, H.A. 2005. “Honourable” or “Highly-Sexed”. Adjectival Descriptions of Male and Female
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Appendix: Adjectives Included in the Study
Adjectives describing Bridget Jones
