Media Representation of Mothers in their International Day: A Social Semiotic Analysis of Selected Saudi Arabian, Egyptian, British and American Newspapers
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Date
2020
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
Université Mouloud Mammeri Tizi Ouzou
Abstract
The present study investigates the representation of mothers in their international day in both selected print and online newspapers: Saudi Arabia’s ‘Arab News’, Egypt’s ‘Daily News Egypt’, Britain’s ‘The Guardian’ and America’s ‘The New York Times’. This research is centered on three objectives. First, it seeks to analyse the visual depiction of mothers in the images of the selected articles by adopting the multimodal social semiotic theory ‘Visual Grammar’ proposed by Kress and Van Leeuwen (1996, 2006). Second, it aims to investigate the way mothers are portrayed linguistically in the news articles by relying on Van Leeuwen’s approach in Critical Discourse Analysis named the ‘ Socio-semantic Inventory’ (2008). Third, this research strives to establish a comparison between the aforementioned newspapers to reveal the main similarities and differences in the depiction of mothers. To achieve these aims, the mixed-methods research which combines the quantitative and qualitative techniques is adopted. The corpus contains eight articles along with eight images. The examination of the selected articles has revealed that Arab News, Daily News Egypt, The Guardian and The News York times provide a positive depiction of mothers at both the visual and the linguistic levels since they are represented as self-reliant and confident persons except image 2 of Arab News, which portrays them as powerless and vulnerable ones at the visual level. Thus, the visual and the linguistic modes complement each other semantically. Furthermore, the comparison has shown that there are some similarities and differences between the newspapers in their visual and linguistic representations of mothers in their international day.
Description
30cm ; 63p. ; ill. en coul.
Keywords
Arab New, Daily News Egypt, The Guardian, The New York Times, International Mother’s Day, Visual Grammar, Socio- semantic Inventory.
Citation
Didactics of Foreign Languages