‘Women and work’: a cross-linguistic corpus-assisted discourse study in German and in Italian

Over the last years, interest towards CADS has significantly grown but cross-linguistic analysis still represents a small niche in this field of research, as emphasized in Partington et al. 2013. Furthermore, Schafroth (2015) highlighted that, in Romance and German Studies, the combination of Corpus Linguistics and Discourse Analysis has not received much attention so far. The aim of this contribution is to investigate, from a comparative corpus-assisted perspective, how discourse on ‘women and work’ is constructed in German and Italian. The analysis has been carried out on two large corpora (itTenTen and deTenTen). Lexical collocates of sequences containing ‘women, work’, ‘work, women’, ‘men, work’ and ‘work, men’ both in Italian and in German have been collected and a sample of concordance lines has been observed in further detail. Results on collocational analysis show that the discourse on ‘women and work’ in German and Italian is constructed around different semantic areas (i.e. equal pay in German and equal opportunities in Italian). On the grounds of these results, it can be argued that in both countries ‘women and work’ is still considered a ‘problematic’ issue, even though the size and type of ‘problems’ to solve are different.