Let's Talk about Sex Education: A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Advice Column Discourses

Abstract

This thesis examines sex education discourses in magazines in an attempt to understand how language helps uphold and/or challenge attitudes in sex education. Specifically, it investigates the advice columns of Dolly, an Australian fashion, beauty, lifestyle and celebrity magazine aimed at teenage girls. The data are taken from two time periods, the mid-1990s and mid-2010s, to allow comparison of the discourses of the past twenty years. Corpus linguistics and Appraisal are used to identify these discourses and the linguistic resources used to construct them. The data are also analysed dialogically, or across the question and answer, to examine how these discourses are negotiated in interaction. This analysis reveals the linguistic strategies used to reproduce or challenge the discourse of the question in the corresponding answer, with certain discourses being ‘mirrored’ (i.e. reproduced) and others being ‘shifted’ (i.e. challenged). This thesis extends existing work on Appraisal to examine evaluation in a large corpus of written dialogic texts. It also extends existing research in corpus linguistics which is primarily concerned with patterns across a number of texts (intertextual analysis) rather than within texts (intratextual analysis). In this way, it offers methodological innovations in addition to important findings on the linguistic construction of sex education discourses.