Sketching women: a corpus-based approach to representations of women’s agency in political Internet corpora in Arabic and English

Authors: Kamran Karimullah

in Corpora

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2020.0184

Abstract:

In this paper, I use methods from corpus linguistics to examine patterns
pertaining to the representation of women in online Arabic- and English-language
political corpora. I highlight the discursive differences and
similarities that characterise the two corpora. Using word sketches, I identify
representational categories in each corpus that are indexed by patterns of
collocation. Analysis of semantic preference and prosody in each corpus
reveals the ways in which women are represented. An exploration of the
representations of women and gendered agency in both corpora reveals
incongruities between the message of women’s empowerment that the outlets
promote and the implicit discursive representations of gender and gendered
agency.