This paper focuses on the collocational behavior of a gendered noun pair ‘king’ and ‘queen’. The Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), developed by Davies (2010), was used to investigate collocational patterns of the two target words across twenty time periods starting from 1810 to 2010. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008)was used to conduct the same analysis with a focus on the more modern time periods. The aim was to investigate all the frequency counts and collocational patterns for both target words in order to analyze any similarities and differences across the time periods, as well as between the two target words. The results reveal changes in the frequency counts for both ‘king’ and ‘queen’ across the years, as well as different frequency counts between the two words, i.e., a higher frequency count for ‘queen’. In addition, more novel collocational patterns are also noted for this same target word (e.g., beauty queen, scream queen, etc.). The results of this research call for further studies of diachronic collocational patterns, as they can result in a better insight into the potential semantic shifts and, consequently, have practical applications, such as in lexicography.
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