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Title Representation of Violence Against Women in Pakistani Print Media Discourse: A Corpus-based Feminist Stylistic Analysis

Author(s) Fozia Noureen

Abstract This research study has attempted to analyse the representation issues of violence against women in Pakistani print media discourse. The researcher has applied a feminist stylistic approach given by Mills (2005) as a lens to analyse it. To benefit from the strengths of both quantitative and qualitative analysis, a mixed method approach was adopted. Corpus-based method was adopted for quantitative analysis and the in depth analysis was carried out using feminist stylistic model. The corpus was created by taking 110 articles from the four major English newspapers in Pakistan. A purposive sampling technique was adopted based on the online availability of these articles and their relevance to the study. The articles covering the issues of domestic violence and sexual abuse were selected. The corpus was analysed on three levels; lexical choices (word level), syntactic choices (phrase level), words in context and correlations (discourse level). Use of adjectives and adverbs was analysed in binary opposition i.e. for man/woman, victim/perpetrator, frequency of the words victim/ survivor and rapist/perpetrator was also analysed to investigate media’s preference of use of specific terms. Key words were analysed in context and collocations of certain words were also explored. In addition, the use of active and passive constructions was also analysed. The results of the study show that the media’s use of language for the representation of violence against women issues is biased and guided by the ideological conventions of society. Some of these features of language like the use of passive constructions and silencing of women’s voices through omission as well as over-lexicalisation of certain ideas reinforce the stereotypes that already exist in society rather than discouraging them. The research concludes that media’s representation of violence against women issues needs to be more conscientious and astute.

Type Thesis/Dissertation MS

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2024-07-27

Subject English Linguistics

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