Boast and bellow, giggle or chatter: gender and verbs of speech in children's fiction
- Authors: Hunt, Sally
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: text , book
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/139279 , vital:37722 , ISBN no ISBN , https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/activity/corpus/events/2017/cl2017/index.aspx
- Description: Continued gender inequality and gendered representations in the media, broadly construed, remain of concern because of the dialectic relationship between language and society. One source of gender cues is fiction written for and consumed by children. The characters encountered in the pages of a popular book constitute the stuff of identity building and may become role models for thousands of young and impressionable readers.
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- Date Issued: 2017
Differentiations and intersections: a corpus-assisted discourse study of gender representations in the British press before, during and after the London Olympics 2012
- Authors: Jaworska, Sylvia , Hunt, Sally
- Date: 2017
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/139205 , vital:37714 , DOI 10.1558/genl.28858
- Description: This study examines the impact of a global sports event on gender representations in media reporting. Whereas previous research on gender, sport and media has been mainly concerned with sports events in the North American or Australian context, this study investigates the British media reporting before, during and after the London Olympics 2012. Our study follows the approach of Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) and uses both quantitative and qualitative research procedures. The results reveal more balanced gender representations during the London Olympics in that the ‘regular’ biased associations were supressed in favour of positive references to female achievements. However, little carry-though of the ‘gains’ was noted. Also, this study shows that the positive associations intersected with national sentiments and were used to celebrate the nation-state. At the same time, some subtle resistance was observed to accepting as ‘truly’ British the non-white athletes and those not born in Britain.
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- Date Issued: 2017
Politics and discourse in South Africa:
- Authors: Hunt, Sally
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , book
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/139249 , vital:37719 , ISBN 9789027206565 , https://benjamins.com/catalog/dapsac.65
- Description: The discourses of the post-apartheid South Africa embody symbols of change and promises of new lessons in history. This is the first volume that brings together analyses of a variety of discourses produced in South Africa through which we follow the evolution of transitional processes in the country’s political institutions and in the opinions of its populace. The book offers to the reader a visit to the Parliament, a peek into the internet forums, analyses of the country's official papers and speeches, and the media accounts. Through all these discourses we see the burning questions – "Who Are We Now?" and "Who Do We Want To Be?" – being repetitively examined and identities cross-formed while the country deals with new, post-apartheid challenges, as well as successes.
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- Date Issued: 2015
Representations of gender and agency in the Harry Potter series:
- Authors: Hunt, Sally
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , book
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/139269 , vital:37721 , ISBN 978-1-137-43173-8 , https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431738_13
- Description: Gender is an all-pervasive and extremely influential construct in the lives of individuals (Taylor, 2003). In children’s literature, we find a reflection of the attitudes towards gender prevalent in a given society at a particular time (Peterson and Lach, 1990). Therefore the study of how gender is represented in children’s literature can make a useful contribution to our understanding of how choices in language use support particular discourses, ‘broad constitutive systems of meaning’ (Sunderland, 2004: 6) or ‘ways of seeing the world’ (op cit: 28). These representations in turn perpetuate prevailing gendered power relations in that society, as research into children’s literature has shown (Thompson and Sealey, 2007). Corpus Linguistics offers a degree of objectivity and efficiency not possible in manual ideological analysis, as well as a set of tools particularly useful for the lexical analysis of considerable quantities of text. In this chapter, I report on my analysis of gendered discourses in the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling, focussing on patterns around grammatical agency in the books.
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- Date Issued: 2015
The representation of sex workers in South African media: danger, morals and human rights
- Authors: Hunt, Sally , Hubbard, Beatrice
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/139101 , vital:37705 , DOI: 10.5842/46-0-618
- Description: The ideological construct of gender typically positions women below men, and “others” certain types of women even more, especially those distinguished from idealised femininity by aspects of their sexuality. This paper explores the representation of sex work and sex workers in the South African media in 2009 and 2010, a time during which there was an increase in news coverage of sex work during the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Analysis of the two data sets revealed that sex work is still often perceived as immoral and dangerous, and that sex workers – overwhelmingly represented as women – are criminalised for their actions while client agency is largely obscured, which is in line with previous studies of South African newspapers. However, a strong liberal representation of sex workers was also found in one data set, which advocates the decriminalisation of sex work in the context of human rights. The use of the term “sex work” and its derivatives, rather than “prostitution”, was found to index this progressive stance.
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- Date Issued: 2015
‘It's just taking our souls back’: discourses of apartheid and race
- Authors: Bock, Zannie , Hunt, Sally
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/124888 , vital:35707 , https://doi.org/10.2989/16073614.2015.1056196
- Description: Although apartheid officially ended in 1994, the issue of race as a primary identity marker has continued to permeate many aspects of private and public life in post-apartheid South Africa. This paper seeks to understand how youth at two South African tertiary institutions position themselves in relation to race and the apartheid past. Our data include four focus group interviews from two universities, one which can be described as historically ‘black’ and the other as historically ‘white’. Given the complex nature of the data, we elected to use a combination of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis as our methodological approach. We explore how words such as black, white, coloured, they, we, us and them feature in the interviews. Our analysis shows that the positioning by the interviewees reflects a complexity and ambivalence that is at times contradictory although several broader discourse patterns can be distilled. In particular, we argue, that all groups employ a range of discursive strategies so as to resist being positioned in the historical positions of ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’. Our paper reflects on these findings as well as what they offer us as we attempt to chart new discourses of the future.
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- Date Issued: 2015
“Mother of the Nation”: representations of womanhood in South African media
- Authors: Hunt, Sally
- Date: 2015
- Language: English
- Type: text , book
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/139229 , vital:37717 , ISBN 9789027206565 , https://benjamins.com/catalog/dapsac.65
- Description: The discourses of the post-apartheid South Africa embody symbols of change and promises of new lessons in history. This is the first volume that brings together analyses of a variety of discourses produced in South Africa through which we follow the evolution of transitional processes in the country’s political institutions and in the opinions of its populace. The book offers to the reader a visit to the Parliament, a peek into the internet forums, analyses of the country's official papers and speeches, and the media accounts. Through all these discourses we see the burning questions – "Who Are We Now?" and "Who Do We Want To Be?" – being repetitively examined and identities cross-formed while the country deals with new, post-apartheid challenges, as well as successes.
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- Date Issued: 2015
A model for the analysis of small group interaction–and beyond?:
- Authors: Hunt, Sally
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/139171 , vital:37711 , DOI: 10.1080/10118063.1997.9724122
- Description: This article describes a branching model developed for the analysis of interaction in small teaching groups in a tertiary setting. Based within Conversation Analysis, the model constitutes a set of justifications for the validity of utterances in terms of their place on the conversational floor. Examples of the classifications included in the model are provided from a broader study of interaction in tutorials at an Eastern Cape university. It is suggested that while the model was developed for a specific context, it could be adapted for use in a variety of contexts.
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- Date Issued: 2012
Health literacy assessment: relexicalising a US test for a South African population
- Authors: Hunt, Sally , Dowse, Roslind , La Rose, Christopher M
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/139131 , vital:37708 , DOI: 10.2989/SALALS.2008.26.2.7.571
- Description: The problems of illiteracy in health contexts have been well documented in the literature and include such serious repercussions as medication non-compliance and failure to seek medical help during the course of an illness. The Rapid Estimate of Adult Literacy in Medicine (REALM) is a standardised health literacy test developed in the United States that has been previously administered and researched in South Africa (Lecoko, 2000). It is an objective vocabulary test, designed as a screening instrument to identify the health literacy levels of patients in clinics, which uses item recognition of 66 health-related words. Lecoko found that, in a South African setting, only 8 out of the 66 words in the US-developed test could be deemed acceptable. Therefore, the current study focused on the principled relexicalisation of the REALM, using words gathered from health information and promotional texts in local clinics, hypothesising that this would improve its applicability. After administration to a statistically similar group of respondents, the number of acceptable words on the test increased from eight to 38. Thus it is concluded that principled relexicalisation may be one way of improving the applicability of standardised health literacy tests to local populations and settings. However, the limitations of standardised tests may prove to be a significant barrier overshadowing the value of relexicalisation.
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- Date Issued: 2009
Some (more) features of conversation amongst women friends:
- Authors: Hunt, Sally
- Date: 2009
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/139149 , vital:37709 , DOI: 10.2989/16073610509486400
- Description: This paper provides an analysis of a conversation between young women friends, which is analysed in terms of Coates’ (1988; 1997; 1999) work on the features of conversation amongst female friends. Coates identifies a number of features which, she says, are typical of conversation between (adult) female friends: a domestic setting, female participants, topics relating to people and feelings, and various formal features including smooth topic development, frequent minimal responses, supportive forms of simultaneous speech and epistemic modality (‘softening’ strategies, including tag questions) (Coates, 1988: 97). The overarching function, she claims, is one of solidarity-building and support: ‘the maintenance of good social relationships’ and ‘the reaffirming and strengthening of friendship’ (Coates, 1988: 98). While this last feature, the function of conversation between women friends, is borne out by the extract to be analysed, the participants in my study utilise different strategies to accomplish it and, in several respects, do not utilise the other features Coates claims to be typical. The research shows, through a detailed analysis of a nineminute extract from a conversation between three women friends, that the features assumed by Coates to be central conversational strategies in the building of female friendship are not the only ways for women to accomplish this function.
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- Date Issued: 2009
Educated mother-tongue South African English: A corpus approach
- Authors: Adendorff, Ralph , de Klerk, Vivian A , de Vos, Mark , Hunt, Sally , Simango, Ronald , Todd, Louise , Niesler, Thomas
- Date: 2008
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/124352 , vital:35597 , https://doi.org/10.1080/10228190608566261
- Description: South Africa is anecdotally known for its complex system of speech varieties correlating with variables such as ethnicity, first language, class and education. These intuitions (e.g. Lass 1990) require further investigation, especially in the context of a changing South Africa where language variety plays a key role in identifying social, economic and ethnic group membership. Thus, in this research, the extent to which these variables play a role in variety is explored using a corpus approach (the nature of class and race in the corpus is discussed more fully later in the article). The corpus project, focusing primarily on accent, has been undertaken by members of the Department of English Language and Linguistics at Rhodes University in South Africa, collaborating with staff from the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. A corpus (the first of its kind) is being compiled, comprising the speech of educated, white, mother-tongue speakers of South African English (as distinct from Afrikaans English, Indian English, and the second language (L2) varieties of English used by speakers of indigenous African languages), and data collection is well under way. This short article aims to describe the aims of the project, and the methodological approach which underpins it, as well as to highlight some of the more problematic aspects of the research.
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- Date Issued: 2008
Discourse domination?: the role of gender in seminar interaction
- Authors: De Klerk, Vivian A , Hunt, Sally
- Date: 2004
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/139160 , vital:37710 , https://www.ajol.info/index.php/salas/article/view/6501
- Description: This paper focuses on the effect of the gender of participants on the discourse patterns of university seminars, and compares the interaction patterns in two undergraduate seminars with those in two post-graduate seminars at Rhodes University. In the undergraduate seminars, two different groups of students at first year level in different disciplines were videotaped. The major difference was in terms of composition: in one seminar, there were equal numbers of male and female students, while in the other, female students dominated numerically (75%). In addition, five of the six formed a close-knit group of friends, which proved to be an important factor in the analysis. At the postgraduate level, the student participants were identical and met in the same venue and at the same time on two successive days to discuss the same topic (affirmative action in the workplace). The important difference between the two classes was the fact that the first seminar was led by a female tutor and the second seminar by a male tutor, both under 40 years of age and white, both members of staff in the department, and both known to the students. The discourse patterns in these two sets of seminars were analysed in order to investigate the ways in which the gender of tutors and students influenced the floor-winning and floor-holding conventions of participants.
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- Date Issued: 2004