Exploring the Representation of Women as Social Actors in a Corpus from the Irish Press at the End of the Celtic Tiger Period

Abstract

This article analyses the representation of women in the Irish press at the end of the Celtic Tiger period (1997-2008). This historical moment is distinguished by an empowerment of women in society. For this reason, the corpus comprises all the texts dealing with immigrant women and women workers from 1 January to 31 December 2008 in Ireland in three Irish newspapers: The Irish Independent, The Irish Post and The Evening Herald. Lexis Nexis will be used as a tool to create the corpus. In order to study the representation of women in the sample of the Irish press already mentioned, van Leeuwen’s (2008) framework for the verbal representation of social actors will be used. The intention of the analysis of women as social actors is to explore how women were portrayed and represented in the said period. For this reason, the analysis will pay attention to the lexical choices used for role allocation, generalisation and specification, association and dissociation, nomination and categorisation, functionalisation and identification, personalisation and impersonalisation as far as the representation of immigrant women and women workers is concerned. The results will show how language and ideology are intertwined at the end of the Celtic Tiger period because women were getting more power in society and this can be seen in the way they were represented in the Irish press.