STEREOTYPES OF WOMEN’S PERCEPTION IN XX-XXI CENTURY ENGLISH STUDIES: CONTRADICTIONS AND SUBJECTIVITY

The relevance of this work is determined by the identified issues aimed at studying the role of languagestereotypes in the construction of the image of a woman rooted in general social and cultural practice of native Eng-lish speakers. The purpose of this article is to consider the gender stereotype as an object of linguistic and cognitiveresearch, to summarize the principles and results of studies of gender stereotypes in the English studies, as well as toassess the impact of stereotypical thinking on a woman’s perception. In accordance with the goals set in this article, wesummarize the works of a number of foreign scholars on gender stereotypes, reconstruct the overview of the problemwith the help of their comparative analysis. We also attempt to prove the inconsistency and injustice of the stereotypicalperception of women in English by singling out pairs of antonymic stereotypical female and male qualities noted byvarious scientists at different times. Proving the inconsistency and injustice of stereotyped perception, we also rely onthe combined results of semantic analysis of attributive-nominative phrases with the core lexeme “woman”, performedearlier, and the lexeme “girl”, presented in this article. We also take into account the semantic analysis of secondary nomination units expressing the stereotypical prototypical qualities of a woman. The study is based on the texts of the British National Corpus of the English language and a selection of examples from authoritative lexicographic sources.