Gender in Media Discourse

Book excerpt: The study investigates how language is used to construct, reconstruct and deconstruct gender in opinion articles in Nigerian newspapers. Drawing on tools and techniques of analysis from critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, systemic functional grammar and cognitive linguistics, the author analyses the many complex and subtle ways in which gender is conceptualized and represented in the newspapers. He shows how the use of some linguistic features and discursive practices contributes to the (re)construction of certain gender identities, roles and power relations between men and women in society. The book contributes to research on language and gender from a non-western perspective.