These women’s verbs : A combined corpus and discourse analysis on reporting verbs about women and men in Czech media 1989–2015

Abstract: This study aims at analyzing how women and men in five different professions are portrayed and represented through reporting verbs in Czech media over a period of 25 years (end of 1989 to the beginning of 2015). The empirical data consist of entire newspapers and magazines in the source material, a subcorpus from the Czech National Corpus. The theoretical basis is Critical discourse analysis and the methodical is a corpus-based statistical analysis. Binary categories from the Harvard Psychosociological Dictionary are used to classify the reporting verbs. After a quantitative study, the results are clear for some professions and less clear for others, and these results are analyzed. This study could not (at least not without severe adjustments) have been performed in languages like English, where the distinction between the female and male professional concepts is less clear. In the chapter on previous research, special attention is given to the Czech context, and the chapter also explains this study’s contribution to previous research in language, power and corpus studies.