The Visibility Of Masculine And Feminine Languages In Columns

Abstract

With the beginning of the feminist movement, gender studies developed over the "woman phenomenon” and focused only on woman researches for many years. Gender and media relations investigated in the main axis of “women's representation in the media”. The "representation of women in media texts" tried to problematized in the perspective of content analysis, discourse analysis and semiology and over these representation forms, "the image of women in patriarchal society" tried to be revealed. In recent years, as the stereotyped roles attached to man and woman underwent a change, the concept of gender has begun to be examined in different dimensions. Researches about media professionals show the existence of a male dominated media structure is still out there. As of March 2014, according to bianet.org and based on mastheads, women journalists were represented by 19 percent whereas men 81 percent in Turkish newspapers. Therefore, the news language still regenerates sexist representations as it carries masculine characteristics. The columns, that the agenda is interpreted from different angles and presented to the readers, are accepted as an important and effective content of the newspapers. Columnists examine the agenda, propose solutions to problems and present their ideas in a specific narrative and linguistic style of their own. This study studies how male and female stereotypes attributed to man and woman in social life are represented by columnists. A specialized corpus, named “TS Column Corpus” was build by 9982 columns harvested from online versions of Turkish Internet Newspapers between 2014 and 2015. The data studied over the frequency of word choices by male and female columnists and analyzed by using corpus linguistics, content and discourse analysis methods, to figure out the reflections of masculine and feminine features in the texts.