Marriage for all (‘Ehe fuer alle’)?! A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the marriage equality debate in Germany

Abstract

This study is situated within corpus-assisted discourse analysis (e.g. Baker, P., & McEnery, T. (2015). Corpora and discourse studies: Integrating discourse and corpora. London: Palgrave Macmillan.) and provides a critical discussion of key topics and stances in the marriage equality debate in Germany. The ways in which the German print media covered the debate are explored through two corpora (created using Nexis) which include relevant texts from three German newspapers (TAZ, Welt, Welt am Sonntag) and two magazines (Der Spiegel, Bunte) from two key periods (July 2000–August 2001 and May 2016–July 2017, respectively); in 2001, Germany introduced ‘civil unions’ (‘eingetragene Lebenspartnerschaften’) but it was only in 2017 that marriage was opened to same-sex couples. Qualitative and quantitative analyses using AntConc and ProtAnt suggest that while there are parallels to marriage equality debates in other countries, there are also language-/culture-specific features. For example, there is a stronger focus on children’s welfare in the contemporary data, since marriage equality meant joint adoption rights for same-sex couples. Through an exploration of keywords/collocations and close reading of prototypical texts, it is shown how linguistic choices contribute to framing the arguments for/against marriage equality and how these stances are connected to culture-specific and cross-cultural norms.