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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Sexuality
Vol. 13:2 (2024) ► pp.129–153

Same-sex marriage, gay marriage, or equal marriage?

Category construction in a corpus of 21st century newspaper texts

| The Open University , United Kingdom
| University of Liverpool , United Kingdom

Changes to marriage legislation across the globe have received much academic and public attention. However, the labels used to categorise different marital configurations are somewhat under researched. In this paper we analyse the premodification of marriage in a corpus of UK newspaper articles (2000–2018) to establish which labels are most commonly used in reference to same-sex marriage. These are gay marriage, same-sex marriage, homosexual marriage, and equal marriage. Drawing on the notion of category construction, we emphasise the fact that these labels are not neutral synonyms, as each encodes a particular understanding of same-sex marriage. Some labels even linguistically exclude certain groups, such as those who are bisexual or transgender. We use the tools of corpus-based discourse analysis to consider the nuanced differences between the category labels and consider whether the limitations of the labels are ever directly challenged.

Keywords: same-sex marriage, gay marriage, category construction, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Marriage, identity, and category labels
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1Category label by source
    • 4.2Same-sex marriage
    • 4.3Gay marriage
    • 4.4Homosexual marriage
    • 4.5Equal marriage
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • References
Published online: 12 July 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.00034.pat
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