Linguistic gender stereotypes in teen situation comedy: analysis of Liv and Maddie (2013) and its translation into Spanish

Abstract

This project consisted on a descriptive and analytic study on two transcripts of Liv and Maddie and their translation into Spanish. By considering specific linguistic features, I followed a general approach to test whether the sitcom portrayed linguistic stereotypes and if they matched previous research on language and gender. The motivation has been the lack of studies concerning stereotyping in teen fiction series. I carried out the study by focusing on the semantic and pragmatic function of the elements. The uses and functions of the features were mostly equally divided between men and women. However, the translation sometimes failed to reproduce the source text functions. My study has not proved to be significantly relevant to the previous research. Despite the lack of data, I consider that the project is a first attempt on the study of stereotyping in the sitcom that might reveal powerful insights if the corpus is enlarged.