Overdetermination of businesswomen in the British press: a corpus-based approach in critical discourse analysis

Within the strand of critical discourse analysis (CDA), research on media portrayal of individuals is prevalent, with the scope having been expanded beyond such subjects as refugees or asylum seekers, but also the breadth of research having been enhanced with larger datasets under the corpus-based approach. This study, utilizing both corpus-based quantitative analysis as well as qualitative analysis, focuses on the depiction of businesswomen in the British press. The corpus comprises business-related articles from The Guardian published in 2017 and 2018, gathered through website crawling. As for qualitative analysis, those articles are examined under the category of overdetermination Kress van Leeuwen’s social actor framework (2008) combined with the metaphor identification procedure (MIP) by Pragglejaz Group (2007). The results show that businesswomen are represented in different social practices, such as maritime, fighting, racing, and climbing. Based on these results, the portrayal of businesswomen in the media is sketched and suggested with further implications.