ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to analyse Malaysian sports news discourse, with special emphasis on ‘dominant’ discourses, which involve instances of objectifying, trivialising, and stereotyping female athletes (Caple 2013). In recent years, some studies have reported that these dominant discourses have decreased and suggest a ‘fairer’ representation of both male and female athletes is emerging (King 2007; Vincent et al. 2002). However, most of the research findings on dominant discourses have been drawn from studies of Western media and thus far, no study has been done on Malaysian media. 1 In this chapter, I will focus my investigation on the representation of male and female sports and athletes through the use of corpus linguistics (CL) and discuss how CL techniques can contribute to the investigation of gender and sports news discourse2. Findings generated from CL analysis can re-affirm or refute findings of previous studies. That said, as this is a pioneering study on sports news and gender representation that examines a large number of texts using corpus linguistics techniques, the linguistic patterns it uncovers may be unique to this study. This methodology might allow the identification of language patterns and salient words in a way that contributes to the investigation of gender bias in sports news discourse.
