Abstract

• Taylor (2003) advocated that gender is “an all-pervasive and extremely influential construct in the lives of individuals”. The way gender is represented in youth literature is worth studying as it can reflect the attitude of society towards gender. It is important to observe how language expressions explicitly or implicitly contribute gender representation through discourse elements like reporting verbs. In analyzing such elements from which gender representation can be inferred, corpus-based approach should be used as it offers, in Hunt (2015)’s words, “a degree of objectivity and efficiency not possible in manual ideological analysis, as well as a set of tools particularly useful for the lexical analysis of considerable quantities of text”. This paper attempts to explore gender representation through types of incantation and reporting verbs which accompany dialogues of incantation. Types of incantation were categorized using definitions by Rowling (2012) and Levy (2013). To reinforce reliability of data analysis and interpretation, WordSmith 8.0, Kendall's tau-b (τb) correlation coefficient and Stepwise Multiple Regression were used in this paper. It is hoped that this paper will be useful for demographic researchers, teachers and students who are approaching gender representation through dialogues in the novel.