A Critical Discourse Analysis of Summit Series: Thereprsentation of Social Actors

This study takes a critical discourse analysis approach to investigate the linguistic representation of male and female social actors and construction of gender identities in the texts of Summit Series. The analytical models used are van Leeuwen's framework and Halliday's transitivity model. The analysis of texts is organized through the qualitative and to some extent quantitative procedures. To investigate the data,achi-square test is run to determine the distribution levels of these linguistic variables in the representation of social actor .Intra and inter-raters reliability estimate to verify the researcher’s findings. The findings of this study indicated a differential representation of social actors in that males were portrayed as more prominent, successful, active, independent, expressive and assertive in comparison with females. Although a surface view reflects that female actors as active one , the underlying ideologies uncovered through the application of CDA proved to be different.