REPRESENTATION OF CYBER HARASSMENT AGAINST MEN AND WOMEN IN THE GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER: A CORPUS-ASSISTED DISCOURSE STUDY

While cyber harassment can manifest itself in many forms for both men and women, it has not been documented in the media and compared by gender. The method that is used in this study is Corpus-assisted Discourse approach and the data are Cyber harassment of men and women in the Guardian newspaper. Two similar subcorpora both of Guardian articles covering cyber harassment of women and cyber harassment of men were created and analysed in the LancsBox corpus analysis system, based on frequency counts, keyword-in-context concordances, and GraphColl collocation networks. The analytical framework is a blending of Corpus Linguistics and Fillmore's Frame Semantics that will be used to analyse collocational patterns, semantic roles and discourse framing. The women's subcorpus proved to be much larger, with the subcorpus's collocates being violence, girls, and sexual; the men's subcorpus was small and lexically structured around the terms of the legal process. The study discovers that the Guardian portrays cyber harassment as mainly a gendered issue of harassing women and harassing men as a smaller, individualised issue. Keywords: Cyber Harassment, Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis, Gender Representation, Media Discourse, Frame Semantics