The project
FemChildLing sets off to contribute a linguistic approach to the concept of female childhood as a socio-cultural construction within English-speaking contexts during the period 1750-1900. Drawing on previous research in the social sciences, the project ultimately aims to ascertain the beneficial impact linguistic models may have on the interdisciplinary investigation of cultural scripts on age identities and age-stages.
More specifically, this teams research will pursue the quantitative and qualitative exploration of the concept of childhood as a culturally constructed age-stage in a corpus of authentic biographical discourse, using rigorously-selected linguistic tools and methods.
The goals of the project are three-fold:
- to explore the potentially diverse role(s) of women’s childhood and female children in dictionaries of national biography within an English-speaking context.
- to verify the existence of a dynamic, cross-cultural and multi-faceted socio-cognitive construal of normal female childhood reflecting learned patterns of thinking during the period and context under scrutiny.
- to reconstruct different schemes of subjective awareness on changing childhood patterns as linguistically projected by living biographers of past lives.