The Portrayal of Women’s Contribution to Irish Society through a Sample from the Irish Press

Abstract

The article intends to approach the representation of womanhood in the Irish press from 2006 to 2012. The corpus comprises all the texts dealing with women, from January 1 to 31 December of four years within this time range, taken from one of the main Irish broadsheet newspapers: The Irish Independent. The research database LexisNexis Academic was employed to compile the corpus. For the purposes of this research, Teun van Leeuwen’s (2008) social actor network model was applied. This paper points out that Corpus Linguistics (CL) can be a powerful complementary tool to Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).