A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of the Discursive Construction of LGBTQ Singaporeans in Media Coverage of Pink Dot
Presenter Title/Affiliation
Ball State University
Start Date
23-5-2021 2:00 PM
Event Name
Panel discussion
Panel Number
24
Panel Chair Name
David Peterson
Zoom URL to Join
https://ciis.zoom.us/j/99469567105
Zoom Meeting ID
994 6956 7105
Abstract
Beginning in the spring of 2009 and continuing annually since, members of Singapore’s LGBTQ communities have assembled at Hong Lim Park at an event dubbed Pink Dot. The original goal of the gathering was to help build a more inclusive nation by standing up to discrimination faced by LGBTQ Singaporeans; the inaugural theme was “freedom to love.” Within a few years, the event had morphed into a budding social movement and by 2018, organizers settled on the more assertive theme of “We are Ready,” which challenged the governments assertions that Singaporeans were “not ready” to embrace LGBTQ equality. While the early Pink Dot events were all but ignored by the mainstream state-run press, the change in tone, the increasing number of attendees, and the participation by members of the ruling People’s Action Party and their families made the gathering impossible to ignore. Following the models of Baker (2004) and Findlay (2017), this paper uses a corpus-based keywords analysis to evaluate the main lexical differences between the media coverage of Pink Dot by the state-run press and that of the sociopolitical blog “The Online Citizen.” Two separate language corpora (state-run press and Online Citizen), each containing approximately 80,000 words, were compiled from available coverage of Pink Dot dating from 2009 to 2018. Using SketchEngine (Kilgariff et al. 2004), top keywords (i.e. love, family unit, homosexual, lifestyle) were identified by comparing these corpora to the EnTenTen 13 corpus. Through a preliminary exploration of the collocational environments and the concordance lines adjoining these keywords, this paper sheds light on how language is being deployed in an attempt to sway a debate of great national and regional significance.
Presenter Contact
rfphillips@bsu.edu
A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of the Discursive Construction of LGBTQ Singaporeans in Media Coverage of Pink Dot
Beginning in the spring of 2009 and continuing annually since, members of Singapore’s LGBTQ communities have assembled at Hong Lim Park at an event dubbed Pink Dot. The original goal of the gathering was to help build a more inclusive nation by standing up to discrimination faced by LGBTQ Singaporeans; the inaugural theme was “freedom to love.” Within a few years, the event had morphed into a budding social movement and by 2018, organizers settled on the more assertive theme of “We are Ready,” which challenged the governments assertions that Singaporeans were “not ready” to embrace LGBTQ equality. While the early Pink Dot events were all but ignored by the mainstream state-run press, the change in tone, the increasing number of attendees, and the participation by members of the ruling People’s Action Party and their families made the gathering impossible to ignore. Following the models of Baker (2004) and Findlay (2017), this paper uses a corpus-based keywords analysis to evaluate the main lexical differences between the media coverage of Pink Dot by the state-run press and that of the sociopolitical blog “The Online Citizen.” Two separate language corpora (state-run press and Online Citizen), each containing approximately 80,000 words, were compiled from available coverage of Pink Dot dating from 2009 to 2018. Using SketchEngine (Kilgariff et al. 2004), top keywords (i.e. love, family unit, homosexual, lifestyle) were identified by comparing these corpora to the EnTenTen 13 corpus. Through a preliminary exploration of the collocational environments and the concordance lines adjoining these keywords, this paper sheds light on how language is being deployed in an attempt to sway a debate of great national and regional significance.
https://digitalcommons.ciis.edu/lavlang/2021/sunday/19
