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Article published In:
Corpus Linguistics in Language and Sexuality Studies: Developments and Prospects
Edited by Heiko Motschenbacher
[Journal of Language and Sexuality 7:2] 2018
► pp. 237–262

Transgender identity labels in the British press

A corpus-based discourse analysis

| University of Naples Federico II, Naples, Italy
This contribution focuses on the linguistic representation of transgender people in the British press, through the analysis of a corpus of newspaper articles collected between 2013 and 2015. Within the framework of Queer Linguistics and Corpus-based Discourse Analysis, this study analyses the linguistic choices retraceable in the corpus under investigation, conveying a given representation of transgender individuals as social subjects. The analysis focuses on naming strategies and the collective representation of transgender identities.
Keywords: transgender identity, British press, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework
    • 2.1Queer linguistics: (Non-)heteronormativity in the press
    • 2.2Trans identities and language
    • 2.3Corpus-based discourse analysis: Combining approaches
  • 3.Methodological tools
    • 3.1The TransCor: Corpus description and collection
    • 3.2Corpus tools: Frequencies, concordances, and collocations
    • 3.3Semantic prosody
  • 4.The British press on transgender people
    • 4.1Combining frequency and concordance analysis: Naming strategies
    • 4.2Collocation analysis: Trans people and other groups
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.17017.zot
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