Gulsum Songül Ercan
Nur Banu Elbulken
Ismail Orkun Atasoy
Dokuz Eylül University (Türkiye)
https://doi.org/10.53656/for2024-05-07
Abstract. News in the print media reflects the editorial policy of the newspaper in which it is published through the selection of linguistic resources. This selection can be identified through the methods of analysis provided by Critical Discourse Analysis. The historical discourse approach, which is an approach to critical discourse analysis, identifies different discursive strategies for analysing certain aspects of texts in order to reveal the difference between the 'positive us' and the 'negative them' encoded by language in texts. One of these strategies, the predictive strategy, reveals what characteristics and qualities are attributed to social actors, objects, facts, events, processes and actions in the discourse by analysing certain linguistic resources in the text. This study examines news texts in the print media about femicide in Turkey in the first half of 2024. The news items that make up the database are taken from Anıt Sayaç (English: Monument Counter), a digital archive that provides information about women killed in Turkey since 2008. The aim of our research is to uncover how women are reflected in the media as social actors in the news stories in question. During the data analysis process, adjectives, adjectival phrases, adjectival clauses and qualifying expressions used to describe female murder victims in news texts were examined. Our findings show that traditional gender roles are reinforced through explicit and/or implicit linguistic resources and implications in news texts by attributing positive/negative expressions to women, and when women transgress these roles, they are presented to readers through the attribution of negative traits.
Keywords: print media; newspaper news texts; femicide; discursive-historical approach; prediction/attribution strategy; gender roles
