A Critical Discourse Analysis: The Representation of ‘Homosexual’, ‘Lesbian’, and ‘Gay’ Collocates Words in Cola and BNC Corpus

Abstract

This is a Critical Discourse Analysis of the collocation of ‘homosexual’, ‘lesbian’, and ‘gay’ terms in the corpus data of Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and British National Corpus (BNC). By conducting Halliday’s theory, this study aims to find out the representation of three terms, ‘homosexual’, lesbian’, and ‘gay’, also the ideology, from the collocation words. As a combined study between Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics, a qualitative and quantitative data were used. By using corpus analysis as the method, the researcher analyzes the ideology based on the collected collocates words. The result of the analysis shows that ‘homosexual’, ‘lesbian’, and ‘gay’ has a linier relationship. Those three terms are used in different area of public text, which are ‘homosexual’ is more acceptable in academic term and ‘lesbian’ and ‘gay’ are mostly used in the non-academic term. Even though COCA and BNC show the different amount of their existence, they are share the same collocation: rights, relationship, lifestyle, identity, activist, and couple.