In this paper, we study gendered patterns of body language descriptions in children’s fiction. We compare a corpus of 19th-century children’s literature with a corpus of contemporary fiction for children. Using a corpus linguistic approach, we study gendered five-word body part clusters, that is, repeated sequences of words that contain at least one body part noun and a marker of gender. Our aim is to identify and describe differences between the description of male and female body language across both corpora. We find that in the 19th century, there are not only fewer clusters for female characters, but the functional range of these clusters is also limited. The contemporary data suggests a trend for male and female clusters to become more similar with the clusters illustrating an increasing range of options for the description of female characters and their interactional spaces.

在本文中，我们研究了儿童小说中肢体语言描述的性别模式。我们将 19 世纪儿童文学的语料库与当代儿童小说语料库进行比较。使用语料库语言方法，我们研究了性别化的五词身体部位簇，即重复的单词序列，其中至少包含一个身体部位名词和一个性别标记。我们的目标是识别和描述两个语料库中男性和女性肢体语言描述之间的差异。我们发现，在19世纪，女性角色的集群不仅更少，而且这些集群的功能范围也很有限。