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.
Bachmann, Ingo. 2011. Civil partnership – “gay marriage in all but name”: A corpus-driven analysis of discourses of same-sex relationships in the UK parliament. Corpora 6(1): 77–105.
Baker, Paul. 2004. “Unnatural acts”: Discourses of homosexuality within the House of Lords debates on gay male law reform. Journal of Sociolinguistics 8(1): 88–106.
Barrett, Rusty. 2002. Is queer theory important for sociolinguistic theory? In Language and Sexuality: Contesting Meaning in Theory and Practice, Kathryn Campbell-Kibler, Robert J. Podesva, Sarah J. Roberts & Andrew Wong (eds), 25–43. Stanford: CSLI Press.
Kilgarriff, Adam, Rychlý, Pavel, Smrž, Pavel & Tugwell, David. 2004. The Sketch Engine. Information Technology. <[URL]> (May 13, 2017)
Koller, Veronika. 2009. Analysing collective identity in discourse: Social actors and contexts. In Critical Discourse Analysis I: Notions of Context and Social Actors, Adele Petitclerc & Philippe Schepens (eds), 69–95. Besançon–Cedex: Presses Universitaire de Franche–Comté.
Leap, William. 2013. Queering language and normativity. Discourse & Society 24(5): 643–648.
Thompson, Geoff. 2004. Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Hodder Education.
Turner, Georgina, Mills, Sara, van der Bom, Isabelle, Coffey-Glover, Laura, Paterson, Laura L. & Jones, Lucy. 2018. Opposition as victimhood in media debates about same-sex marriage. Discourse & Society 29(2): 180–197.
van Leeuwen, Theo. 1996. The representation of social actors. In Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis, Carmen Rosa Caldas-Coulthard & Malcolm Coulthard (eds), 32–70. London: Routledge.
van Leeuwen, Theo. 2008. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cited by (11)
Cited by 11 other publications
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2024. A Pragma-Gender Study of Select Couples’ Emotive Language. In Gender and Leadership in Nigeria and Ghana, ► pp. 141 ff.
2023. Religious lobbying and policy influence: Christian interest group impacts around the legalization of same‐sex marriage in England and Wales. Politics & Policy 51:6 ► pp. 1097 ff.
Hill, G. & C. Bulley
2023. Help me to come out gracefully! Working with lesbian, gay, and bisexual, people affected by cancer to develop a national practitioner guide supporting inclusive care. Radiography 29 ► pp. S81 ff.
2022. Radical contingency, radical historicity and the spread of ‘homosexualism’: A diachronic corpus-based critical discourse analysis of queer representation in The Times between 1957–1967 and 1979–1990. Discourse, Context & Media 48 ► pp. 100623 ff.
Zheng, Yue & Lik Sam Chan
2022. Framing same-sex marriage in U.S. liberal and conservative newspapers from 2004 to 2016: Changes in issue attributes, organizing themes, and story tones. The Social Science Journal 59:1 ► pp. 34 ff.
2021. A Dry Branch on the Nation’s Body: The Nation’s Biological Reproduction between Gender and Sexuality. Treatises and Documents, Journal of Ethnic Studies / Razprave in Gradivo, Revija za narodnostna vprašanja 87:87 ► pp. 69 ff.
Kania, Ursula
2020. Marriage for all (‘Ehe fuer alle’)?! A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the marriage equality debate in Germany. Critical Discourse Studies 17:2 ► pp. 138 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 9 january 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.