Use of the noun 'feminist' in liberal and conservative written media in the United States: A corpus assisted discourse analysis study

Abstract

This thesis is a corpus assisted discourse analysis study on the use of the noun ‘feminist’ in liberal and conservative written media in the United States. The aim of this study is to find out, which adjectival premodifiers collocate with the noun ‘feminist’ in the United States press. In addition, this study aims to find out, how do the collocates found convey attitudes towards feminists and feminism in liberal and conservative press, and whether the attitudes differ based on the political leaning of the news outlets. The hypothesis of this study is that liberal press uses the noun ‘feminist’ in more neutral or positive manner, and conservative press uses it in a more negative manner. The data for this study are the 50 most frequently appearing adjectival premodifiers collocating with the noun ‘feminist’ in the United States, and the text samples, thus hits, each news outlet chosen for this study elicits with each adjectival premodifier. The data is acquired from the NOW Corpus with the Collocation search, and analyzed after with the Appraisal framework, linguistic bias and context analysis. The analysis of the results of this study are divided to all collocates, collocates ‘radical’ and ‘black’, as they were the most frequently appearing collocates found with the noun ‘feminist’, and attitudes. The final results of this study are the following: both liberal and conservative news outlets convey neutral attitudes towards feminists the most, but conservative press conveys negative leaning attitudes after neutral, and liberal press positive leaning attitudes after neutral.