Media Representation of Women in their International Day: A Social Semiotic Analysis of Selected Algerian, American and British Newspapers
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Date
2017-06
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University Mouloud Mammeri of Tizi-Ouzou
Abstract
The present study purports itself to investigate the representation of women in their international day in some selected Algerian, American and British newspapers: El Khabar and El Watan, The New York Times and The Guardian respectively. The corpus consists of eight news articles along with nine visual images accompanying them. This research is centered around three objectives. First, it analyses the way women are portrayed visually in the images of the selected news articles relying on the multimodal social semiotic theory ‘Visual Grammar’ proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen (1996, 2006). Second, it explores how women are represented linguistically in the news articles by adopting van Leeuwen’s framework in Critical Discourse Analysis named ‘the Socio-semantic Inventory’(1996, 2008). Third, this study seeks to draw a comparison between the four afore-mentioned newspapers to sort out the main similarities and differences in their pictorial and linguistic depiction of women in their international day. To reach these aims, the mixed method research which combines both quantitative and qualitative research techniques is adopted. The examination of the selected news articles has revealed that El Watan, The Guardian and The New York Times provide a positive depiction of women both visually and linguistically while El Khabar portrays women negatively at the visual level. Thus, the visual and the linguistic modes do no complement each other semantically in El Khabar. Additionally, the comparison has shown that the newspapers share some similarities and differences in their visual and linguistic portrayal of women in relation to their international day.
Description
68p.:ill;30cm.(+cd)
Keywords
international day (8th of March), El Khabar, El Watan, The New York Times, The Guardian, Visual Grammar, Critical Discourse Analysis, the Socio-semantic Inventory.
Citation
Linguistique Appliquée et Sémiotique Sociale