Kedveš, Ana (2019) Representation of a same-sex marriage debate in national and international online media reports : the case of “In the Name of the Family” in Croatia. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

In December 2013 Croatia held its first citizen-initiated referendum in which the voters supported introducing a heteronormative definition of marriage into the Constitution. This study explores the representation of the pre-referendum debate in the national and international media discourse. Two corpora are compiled with the WebBootCaT method for this purpose, one containing online reports in Croatian (455,125 tokens) and another one in the English language (101,381 tokens). Quantitative procedures were used to inform in-depth qualitative analysis focused on three key elements of the representation of the debate discourse: the social actors involved, the contents they debated and the legitimation strategies they employed.

The study proposes a new approach to identifying the social actors in the text, built on the transitivity system (Halliday 1985, 2014) and using verbal processes in the corpora as a tool for locating the social actors as sayers. The qualitative analysis of social actors’ representation found a strong polarisation between the referendum supporters and opponents, which can be related to the pre-existing political and ideological divisions in Croatian society. The contents of the debate were split between the private and the public semantic domain, the latter being predominant in both corpora. However, the national corpora reports were more concerned about the legal framework of the referendum procedure, and the international reports focused on the human and LGBT rights situation in Croatia. Discursive legitimation strategies in the corpora were studied based on van Leeuwen’s model (2008), and strategies based on morality and rationalisation were found to be the most frequent. Furthermore, ‘legitimation by majority’ is proposed as an additional strategy, as it emerges in the national and international corpora, encompassing legitimation by authority, morality and rationalisation.

The findings highlight the different role of the media in the national and international context. In general, the study contributes to a better understanding of the issue of anti-minority movements and their construction in the media discourse of post-transition countries, as well as the discourse on direct democracy exercised with few legal restrictions.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain > DAW Central Europe H Social Sciences > HQ The family. Marriage. Woman
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Same-sex marriage -- Press coverage -- Croatia, Same-sex marriage -- Social aspects -- Croatia, Same-sex marriage -- Moral and ethical aspects -- Croatia, Same-sex marriage -- Political aspects -- Croatia, Marriage -- Social aspects -- Croatia
Official Date:	December 2019
Dates:	Date Event December 2019 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Centre for Applied Linguistics
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Wharton, Sue ; MacDonald, Malcolm, 1953- ; Schnurr, Stephanie, 1975-
Sponsors:	Economic and Social Research Council (Great Britain) ; Frankopan Fund
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	xiv, 271 leaves : illustrations (some colour)
Language:	eng

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