REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN: A CORPUS BASED CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF NEWS COLUMNS OF THE DAILY DAWN.

In this paper, the differences in the representation of women in male and female writers' news columns written in the Pakistani daily newspaper Dawn are studied through corpus based critical discourse analysis. For this purpose, two corpora i.e. male journalists' corpus (MJC) and female journalists' corpus (FJC) are built, each having a word length of 24774 word tokens. The freeware, Ant Conc 3.4.1, is used to analyze the data, the keyness technique is used for keywords in their contexts, and critical discourse analysis of the occurrences is done. The results show the differences that exist in male and female journalists' discourses. The male writers' representation is significantly different from that of female writers. In the male journalists' writings, women are usually shown more passive either receiving some benefits from the others or receiving some sort of violence or torture. In the male writers' discussion, active roles of women in Pakistani society are rarely found. In the female journalists' discourse, on the other hand, active roles of women are more frequent as compared to passive roles. The study focuses on only one aspect of the issue. More researches are required to establish the differences in the male and female journalists' discourses about women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]