And what about same sex marriages? A corpus-based analysis of lexical choices and social attitudes

Language change is strikingly visible mostly and firstly on the lexical level; words can then be considered important hints of how cultures develop and how society is shaped accordingly.The paper I would like to present aims at analyzing contrastively the English and the Italian culture, investigating how ‘domestic’ lexical change, i.e. the normal development of lexis within national borders, manages to describe social and cultural changes together with shaping the perception of social phenomena and the behaviours that stem from them. For the purpose of the research a diachronic corpus-based analysis will be conducted on English and Italian corpora. This presentation will report on a diachronic corpus-based analysis examining how same-sex relationships have been described in British and Italian newspaper articles over the past 30 years and what is implied by their descriptions in terms of their relationship with the respective societies. The study integrates diachronic corpus-based analysis with text analysis based on close reading. The focus of the analyses is placed on descriptions of same-sex relationships in the newspaper articles through the eyes of the writers, which could partially be reflecting societal values and gender roles. This approach is worthwhile as there seem to be only a limited number of projects which analyses gendered texts in newspapers using diachronic corpora (Baker 2010; Fasold et al. 1990; Stubbs 1996). The focus will be on socially significant words such as: same-sex marriage as opposed to gay-marriage etc