The portrayal of women in selected British newspapers

Seminar paper from the year 1998 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0 (A), http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Anglistics/American Studies), course: HS: Linguistic Analysis: Events in complex media coverage, 18 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The topic of this paper is the representation of women in selected British newspapers. The question which I will try to answer is, whether women are portrayed significantly different from men and if so, in how far this is brought about linguistically. After giving a short synopsis of why a non- discriminatory treatment of women in the media may be favourable, I will first give statistical evidence from the material collected and supplement this with statistical information on where women stand in society. I will then go on to analyse staff and correspondents to see in how far women are involved in the perceptible news production or news reception. After having finished these chapters leading up to the topic of the linguistic analysis, I will then focus on the language in the newspapers. Here, attention will be both on the grammatical and the lexical level. On the lexical level telling semantic devices will be categorisation, generic usage, marked expressions and naming, among others. On the grammatical level, clause structures, noun phrases, verb phrases, activity, passivity and others will be of interest. A final conclusion will summarise the findings. The material used will be the internet editions of five major British newspapers. These were randomly selected and downloaded in the last week of July 1998. The five newspapers chosen are (in alphabetical order) the Guardian, the Independent, the Mirror, the Star and the Times.