Media representations of ‘leftover women’ in China

a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis

Authors

  • Yu Yating The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.36223

Keywords:

leftover women, media representations, corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, gender ideologies

Abstract

The term ‘leftover women’, commonly referring to single women older than 27, has been in popular use in Chinese media since 2007. This study investigates how leftover women are linguistically represented in the English-language news media in China by employing a corpus-assisted approach to critical discourse analysis. A specialised corpus of 303 English news articles (i.e. 236,254 words), covering the years between 2007 and 2017, was built for this purpose. Corpus linguistics techniques were employed to quantify the meaning shift units (MSUs) of the lemma leftover WOMAN, and van Leeuwen’s ‘social actors and actions theory’ was applied to inform the classification of MSUs in context. These findings shed light on media representations of leftover women, the contested ideologies emerging from these representations, and how shifting gender politics and identity shapes and is shaped by media in the world’s most populous nation.

Author Biography

  • Yu Yating, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University

    Yu Yating is a PhD candidate from the Department of English, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her research interests are in gender studies, corpus linguistics and (critical) discourse analysis. Her paper ‘Gender and conversational humor in a televised situational comedy: implications for EFL contexts’ appeared in English for Specific Purposes World in 2014.

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Published

2019-10-17

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Yating, Y. (2019). Media representations of ‘leftover women’ in China: a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. Gender and Language, 13(3), 369–395. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.36223