On the semantic prosody of career women in Chinese web reportage

Abstract

The present study tries to unveil the images of career women depicted on the internet within the framework of corpus linguistics. Based on web corpora, internet reportage of women from the fields of education, politics, business, media, medicine, law, and tourist industry are investigated. Through collocate analysis, it is found that all the above career women demonstrate unfavorable semantic prosody, a unique local semantic prosody on the internet. The unfavorable collocates can be further classified into the semantic sets of erotic events, misfortunes and job scandals. However, through Keyword analysis of reportage of women in China’s mainstream newspapers, there presents a quite positive women image. Finally, the author makes possible interpretations of the causes of the violation of semantic prosody on the web and possible consequences it will bring, with two solutions being suggested at the end.