Interpersonal Relationships in Japanese and Australian Women's Magazines: A Case Study

Abstract

Women’s magazines have been a focus of research in various disciplines, and such research has made use of different methodologies as well as taking diverse approaches. This paper analyses texts selected from an Australian women’s magazine 'Cleo' and its Japanese equivalent 'With' by using Systemic Functional Linguistics as a core methodology. The texts were chosen from topic areas such as love relationships, finance and diet/exercises, and all take forms of advice giving. The lexico-grammatical analysis of the texts focused on investigation of the ways these texts construct the relationship between the writer and the reader, which has revealed interesting features in the Japanese texts that did not appear in the English texts.