Media representations of ‘leftover women’ in China
a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.36223Keywords:
leftover women, media representations, corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis, gender ideologiesAbstract
The term ‘leftover women’, commonly referring to single women older than 27, has been in popular use in Chinese media since 2007. This study investigates how leftover women are linguistically represented in the English-language news media in China by employing a corpus-assisted approach to critical discourse analysis. A specialised corpus of 303 English news articles (i.e. 236,254 words), covering the years between 2007 and 2017, was built for this purpose. Corpus linguistics techniques were employed to quantify the meaning shift units (MSUs) of the lemma leftover WOMAN, and van Leeuwen’s ‘social actors and actions theory’ was applied to inform the classification of MSUs in context. These findings shed light on media representations of leftover women, the contested ideologies emerging from these representations, and how shifting gender politics and identity shapes and is shaped by media in the world’s most populous nation.
References
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Chen, J. (2013). Do Not Marry before Age 30. Zhe Jiang: Zhe Jiang Publishing United Group.
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Cheng, W. and Lam, P. (2010). Media discourses in Hong Kong: change in representation of human rights. Text and Talk 30(5): 507–27. https://doi.org/10.1515/text.2010.025
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Gaetano, A. (2014). ‘Leftover women’: postponing marriage and renegotiating womanhood in urban China. Journal of Research in Gender Studies 2: 124–49.
Gauntlett, D. (2008). Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
Global Times. (2018). About the Global Times. Retrieved 4 August 2018 from http://www.globaltimes.cn/about-us/.
Greaves, C. (2009). ConcGram 1.0: A Phraseological Search Engine. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hall, S. (1997). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage Publications in association with the Open University.
Holmes, J. (2000). Ladies and gentlemen: corpus analysis and linguistic sexism. In C. Mair and M. Hundt (eds) Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 141–55. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Holmes, J. and Sigley, R. (2001). What’s a word like girl doing in a place like this? In A. Smith and P. Peters (eds) New Frontiers of Corpus Linguistics 247–63. Amsterdam: Rodopi. https://doi.org/10.3917/popu.1603.0610
Hunston, S. (2007). Semantic prosody revisited. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12(2): 249–68.
Ji, Y. (2015). Between tradition and modernity: ‘leftover’ women in Shanghai. Journal of Marriage and Family 77(5): 1057–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12220
Kilgarriff, A. (2005). Language is never, ever, ever, random. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(2): 263–76. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt.2005.1.2.263
Lake, R. (2018). Leftover in China: The Women Shaping the World’s Next Superpower. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Li, Y. and Li, W. (eds). (2013). The Language Situation in China. Berlin: De Gruyten Mouton.
Luo, A., Wang, F. and Jiang, Y. (2014). Zhongguo Shengnv Diaocha [Investigation into China’s Leftover Women]. Guangzhou: Guangdong Renmin Chubanshe [Guangdong People’s Publishing House].
Luo, W. and Sun, Z. (2015). Are you the one? China’s TV dating shows and the Sheng Nü ‘s predicament. Feminist Media Studies 15(2): 239–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2014.913648
Mautner, G. (2009). Checks and balance: how corpus linguistics can contribute to CDA. In R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis 122–43. London: Sage.
Nartey, M. and Mwinlaaru, I. N. (2019). Towards a decade of synergizing corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis: a meta-analysis. Corpora 14(2): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2019.0169
Norberg, C. (2016). Naughty boys and sexy girls: the representation of young individuals in a web-based corpus of English. Journal of English Linguistics 44(4): 291–317. https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424216665672
O’Halloran, K. (2010). How to use corpus linguistics in the study of media discourse. In A. O’Keeffe and M. McCarthy (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics 563–76. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203856949.ch40
Partington, A. (2004). ‘Utterly content in each others company’: semantic prosody and semantic preference. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9(1): 131–56. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.9.1.07par
Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2001). Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203993712
Romaine, S. (2000). Language in Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scott, M. (2013). WordSmith Tools (Version 6.0). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sigley, R. and Holmes, J. (2002). Looking at girls in corpora of English. Journal of English Linguistics 30(2): 138–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/007242030002004
Sinclair, J. M. (1996). The search for units of meaning. Textus 9(1): 75–106.
Sinclair, J. M. (2004). Trust the Text. London: Routledge.
Sinclair, J. M. (2005). Corpus and text: basic principles. In M. Wynne (ed.) Developing Linguistic Corpora : A Guide to Good Practice 1–16. Oxford: Oxbow Books on behalf of the Arts and Humanities Data Service.
Stubbs, M. (1995). Collocations and semantic profiles: on the cause of the trouble with quantitative studies. Functions of Language 2(1): 1–33.
Stubbs, M. (2001). Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sung, S. and Pascall, G. (eds). (2014). Gender and Welfare States in East Asia: Confucianism or Gender Equality? New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314796_9
Taylor, C. (2013). Searching for similarity using corpus-assisted discourse studies. Corpora 8(1): 81–113.
To, S. (2013). Understanding sheng nu (‘leftover women’): the phenomenon of late marriage among Chinese professional women. Symbolic Interaction 36(1): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.46
To, S. (2015a). China’s Leftover Women: Late Marriage among Professional Women and its Consequences. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315857596
To, S. (2015b). ‘My mother wants me to jiaru-haomen (marry into a rich and powerful family)!’ SAGE Open 2015: 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244014567057
van Dijk, T. A. (2008). Discourse and Context: A Socio-cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Leeuwen, T. (1996). The representation of social actors. In C. R. Caldas-Coulthard and M. Coulthard (eds) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis 32–70. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.184.55lee
van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404509990686
Wang, H. and Yang, Y. (2017). ‘Shengnv’ ‘zhinanai’ deng ciyu bei jinyong [The usage of ‘leftover girl’ and ‘straight men cancer’, etc. is banned]. China Women’s News (28 July). Retrieved from http://paper.cnwomen.com.cn/content/2017-07/28/040812.html.
Wang, J. (2011). Jiaoyu, renli ziben yu hunyin jiya – Jianlun ‘shengnü’ xianxiang [Education, human capital and the marriage squeeze – with a discussion of the ‘leftover women’ phenomenon]. Zhongguo Chengshi Yanjiu [China Urban Studies] 6(3): 180–85.
Warner, M. (ed.). (1993). Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Widdowson, H. G. (2000). On the limitations of linguistics applied. Applied Linguistics 21(2): 3–25.
You, J., Yi, X. and Chen, M. (2016). Love, life, and ‘leftover ladies’ in urban China. Munich Personal RePEc Archive 70494. Retrieved from https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/70494.
Anthony, L. and Baker, P. (2015). ProtAnt: a freeware tool for automated prototypical text detection. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 20(3): 273–92.
Baker, P. (2008a). ‘Eligible’ bachelors and ‘frustrated’ spinsters: corpus linguistics, gender and language. In K. Harrington, L. Litosseliti, H. Sauntson and J. Sunderland (eds) Gender and Language Research Methodologies 73–84. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amr005
Baker, P. (2008b). Sexed Texts: Language, Gender and Sexuality. London: Equinox.
Baker, P. (2014). Using Corpora to Analyse Gender. London: Bloomsbury.
Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., Khosravinik, M., Mcenery, T. and Wodak, R. (2008). A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. Discourse and Society 19(3): 273–306. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926508088962
Bell, D. A. and Chaibong, H. (eds). (2003). Confucianism for the Modern World. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Caldas-Coulthard, C. R. and Moon, R. (2010). ‘Curvy, hunky, kinky’: using corpora as tools for critical analysis. Discourse and Society 21(2): 99–133. https://doi.org/10.1177/0957926509353843
Cameron, D. and Kulick, D. (2003). Language and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chen, J. (2013). Do Not Marry before Age 30. Zhe Jiang: Zhe Jiang Publishing United Group.
Cheng, W. (2013). Corpus-based linguistic approaches to critical discourse analysis. In C. A. Chapelle (ed.) The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics 1–8. Mahwah, NJ: Blackwell.
Cheng, W., Greaves, C., Sinclair, J. M. and Warren, M. (2009). Uncovering the extent of the phraseological tendency: towards a systematic analysis of concgrams. Applied Linguistics 30(2): 236–52. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amn039
Cheng, W., Greaves, C. and Warren, M. (2006). From n-gram to skipgram to concgram. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 11: 411–33. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.11.4.04che
Cheng, W. and Lam, P. (2010). Media discourses in Hong Kong: change in representation of human rights. Text and Talk 30(5): 507–27. https://doi.org/10.1515/text.2010.025
Cheng, W. and Lam, P. (2013). Western perceptions of Hong Kong ten years on: a corpus-driven critical discourse study. Applied Linguistics 34(2): 173–90. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/ams038
Fairclough, N. (1995). Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.
Fairclough, N. (2010). Critical Discourse Analysis: The Critical Study of Language (2nd ed.). London: Routledge.
Fairclough, N. (2015). Language and Power (3rd ed.). New York: Routledge.
Feldshuh, H. (2018). Gender, media, and myth-making: constructing China’s leftover women. Asian Journal of Communication 28(1): 38–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/01292986.2017.1339721
Fincher, L. H. (2014). Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China. London: Zed Books. https://doi.org/10.3917/popu.1603.0610
Fincher, L. H. (2016). Shengnü Shidai [Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China]. Xiemen: Lujiang Publishing House.
Gabrielatos, C. and Duguid, A. (2015). Corpus linguistics and CDA: revisiting the notion of synergy. Paper presented at Corpus Linguistics in the South 9, Oxford Brooks University, 18 April. Retrieved from https://research.edgehill.ac.uk/ws/files/20355493/CLS9.Gabrielatos_Duguid.pdf.
Gaetano, A. (2009). Single women in urban China and the ‘unmarried crisis’ : gender resilience and gender transformation. In R. Greatrex and N. Brand (eds) Working Papers in Contemporary Asian Studies 1–21. Lund: Centre for East and South Asian Studies, Lund University.
Gaetano, A. (2014). ‘Leftover women’: postponing marriage and renegotiating womanhood in urban China. Journal of Research in Gender Studies 2: 124–49.
Gauntlett, D. (2008). Media, Gender and Identity: An Introduction (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.
Global Times. (2018). About the Global Times. Retrieved 4 August 2018 from http://www.globaltimes.cn/about-us/.
Greaves, C. (2009). ConcGram 1.0: A Phraseological Search Engine. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hall, S. (1997). Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage Publications in association with the Open University.
Holmes, J. (2000). Ladies and gentlemen: corpus analysis and linguistic sexism. In C. Mair and M. Hundt (eds) Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 141–55. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Holmes, J. and Sigley, R. (2001). What’s a word like girl doing in a place like this? In A. Smith and P. Peters (eds) New Frontiers of Corpus Linguistics 247–63. Amsterdam: Rodopi. https://doi.org/10.3917/popu.1603.0610
Hunston, S. (2007). Semantic prosody revisited. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 12(2): 249–68.
Ji, Y. (2015). Between tradition and modernity: ‘leftover’ women in Shanghai. Journal of Marriage and Family 77(5): 1057–73. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12220
Kilgarriff, A. (2005). Language is never, ever, ever, random. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 1(2): 263–76. https://doi.org/10.1515/cllt.2005.1.2.263
Lake, R. (2018). Leftover in China: The Women Shaping the World’s Next Superpower. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Li, Y. and Li, W. (eds). (2013). The Language Situation in China. Berlin: De Gruyten Mouton.
Luo, A., Wang, F. and Jiang, Y. (2014). Zhongguo Shengnv Diaocha [Investigation into China’s Leftover Women]. Guangzhou: Guangdong Renmin Chubanshe [Guangdong People’s Publishing House].
Luo, W. and Sun, Z. (2015). Are you the one? China’s TV dating shows and the Sheng Nü ‘s predicament. Feminist Media Studies 15(2): 239–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2014.913648
Mautner, G. (2009). Checks and balance: how corpus linguistics can contribute to CDA. In R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds) Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis 122–43. London: Sage.
Nartey, M. and Mwinlaaru, I. N. (2019). Towards a decade of synergizing corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis: a meta-analysis. Corpora 14(2): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.3366/cor.2019.0169
Norberg, C. (2016). Naughty boys and sexy girls: the representation of young individuals in a web-based corpus of English. Journal of English Linguistics 44(4): 291–317. https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424216665672
O’Halloran, K. (2010). How to use corpus linguistics in the study of media discourse. In A. O’Keeffe and M. McCarthy (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Corpus Linguistics 563–76. Abingdon: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203856949.ch40
Partington, A. (2004). ‘Utterly content in each others company’: semantic prosody and semantic preference. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9(1): 131–56. https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.9.1.07par
Reisigl, M. and Wodak, R. (2001). Discourse and Discrimination: Rhetorics of Racism and Antisemitism. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203993712
Romaine, S. (2000). Language in Society: An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Scott, M. (2013). WordSmith Tools (Version 6.0). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sigley, R. and Holmes, J. (2002). Looking at girls in corpora of English. Journal of English Linguistics 30(2): 138–57. https://doi.org/10.1177/007242030002004
Sinclair, J. M. (1996). The search for units of meaning. Textus 9(1): 75–106.
Sinclair, J. M. (2004). Trust the Text. London: Routledge.
Sinclair, J. M. (2005). Corpus and text: basic principles. In M. Wynne (ed.) Developing Linguistic Corpora : A Guide to Good Practice 1–16. Oxford: Oxbow Books on behalf of the Arts and Humanities Data Service.
Stubbs, M. (1995). Collocations and semantic profiles: on the cause of the trouble with quantitative studies. Functions of Language 2(1): 1–33.
Stubbs, M. (2001). Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sung, S. and Pascall, G. (eds). (2014). Gender and Welfare States in East Asia: Confucianism or Gender Equality? New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137314796_9
Taylor, C. (2013). Searching for similarity using corpus-assisted discourse studies. Corpora 8(1): 81–113.
To, S. (2013). Understanding sheng nu (‘leftover women’): the phenomenon of late marriage among Chinese professional women. Symbolic Interaction 36(1): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1002/symb.46
To, S. (2015a). China’s Leftover Women: Late Marriage among Professional Women and its Consequences. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315857596
To, S. (2015b). ‘My mother wants me to jiaru-haomen (marry into a rich and powerful family)!’ SAGE Open 2015: 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244014567057
van Dijk, T. A. (2008). Discourse and Context: A Socio-cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
van Leeuwen, T. (1996). The representation of social actors. In C. R. Caldas-Coulthard and M. Coulthard (eds) Texts and Practices: Readings in Critical Discourse Analysis 32–70. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.184.55lee
van Leeuwen, T. (2008). Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404509990686
Wang, H. and Yang, Y. (2017). ‘Shengnv’ ‘zhinanai’ deng ciyu bei jinyong [The usage of ‘leftover girl’ and ‘straight men cancer’, etc. is banned]. China Women’s News (28 July). Retrieved from http://paper.cnwomen.com.cn/content/2017-07/28/040812.html.
Wang, J. (2011). Jiaoyu, renli ziben yu hunyin jiya – Jianlun ‘shengnü’ xianxiang [Education, human capital and the marriage squeeze – with a discussion of the ‘leftover women’ phenomenon]. Zhongguo Chengshi Yanjiu [China Urban Studies] 6(3): 180–85.
Warner, M. (ed.). (1993). Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Widdowson, H. G. (2000). On the limitations of linguistics applied. Applied Linguistics 21(2): 3–25.
You, J., Yi, X. and Chen, M. (2016). Love, life, and ‘leftover ladies’ in urban China. Munich Personal RePEc Archive 70494. Retrieved from https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/70494.
Published
2019-10-17
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Yating, Y. (2019). Media representations of ‘leftover women’ in China: a corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. Gender and Language, 13(3), 369–395. https://doi.org/10.1558/genl.36223
