Preschool teachers, primary school teachers, subject teachers, and professors in public discourse in Serbia

The status of educators, people who carry out education in a society, is reflected in big linguistic corpora as well. The material comprised of millions of linguistic forms can be used to examine the image created about certain phenomena in a specific linguistic community. For the purposes of this paper, the subcorpora related to preschool teachers, primary school teachers, subject teachers, and professors were selected from a wider corpus Public Discourse in the Republic of Serbia and examined. Concordances for 10 lemmas – neutral/masculine, and feminine, as well as different dialectal and orthographic forms – were excerpted and a smaller, randomly selected subsample was created for each of them. Based on this, critical discourse analysis showed how preschool teachers, primary school teachers, subject teachers, and professors are conceptualised in public discourse in Serbia. They are generally presented as people who try to give their best at workplace, despite many (un)expected obstacles. Notably, more concrete examples, which almost always include female counterparts, have more negative ratings. In addition, the analysis showed that there exists a hierarchy among different professions, wwith professors receiving the most attention and they are portrayed in public discourse as individuals who are, above all, reflective thinkers and convey “neutral” data.