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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. 175–204

Discourses of marriage in same-sex marriage debates in the UK press 2011–2014

| The Open University
| Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom

This paper interrogates media representations of same-sex marriage debates in the UK using a combination of corpus linguistics tools and close reading, and drawing on Queer Linguistics. Following related work by Bachmann (2011), Baker (2004), and Love and Baker (2015), we analyse a 1.3 million-word corpus of UK national newspaper texts compiled for the Discourses of Marriage Research Group. Our corpus stretches from September 2011 and the announcement of a government consultation on same-sex marriage, to April 2014 when the first same-sex marriages took place. Using a top-down approach we investigate the discourses drawn upon in same-sex marriage debates (as indexed by keywords and key semantic fields) and uncover the binary social categories used to normalise social structures and hold the same-sex marriage debate in place. We also consider which social actors are (not) given a voice and/or agency and discuss how (same-sex) marriage is constituted.

Keywords: same-sex marriage, queer theory, discourse, corpus linguistics, social actors, semantic domains
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Queer Theory, corpus linguistics, and same-sex marriage debates
  • 3.Building the corpus
  • 4.Analysis
    • 4.1The terms of debate
    • 4.2The semantics of same-sex marriage
    • 4.3Defining marriage
    • 4.4Social actors and agency
  • 5.Discussion and conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.17022.pat
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