On The Semantic Prosody Of The Reportage Of Professional Women In Web News Headlines

As an important research field of communication studies, media and gender studies aim to reveal and criticize the stereotyped images of women presented in the media through text analysis in mass media. The author tries to conduct media and gender studies from the perspective of corpus linguistics. Through Keyword analysis of reportage of women on Women's Day from China's mainstream newspapers, research findings show that women have gradually stepped out of the family and made more and more contributions to society in various professions, with increasingly higher and higher social status. However, women images are quite differently presented on the web. Based on web corpus, the author chooses the reportage of professional women in web news headlines as research objects. The words chosen are"female teacher","female doctor","female official","female boss","female reporter","female nurse","female lawyer"and"female tour guide"from education, politics, business, media, medicine, law, and tourist industries. Conducted within the framework of Appraisal Theory, and by use of concordance and collocate analysis, the research finds out that web media tend to use negative judgment and appreciation strategies, and use words whose semantic features deviate from those of professional women, which leads to the presence of unfavorable semantic prosody of professional women, a unique local semantic prosody. Meanwhile, it is also found out that the unfavorable collocates can be generally classified into the semantic sets of erotic events, misfortunes and job scandals. The occurrence of this phenomenon is closely related to the pursuit of commercial interests on the part of web media. As the competition between web media becomes more and more fierce, they try to improve the clicking rates of their websites by producing intriguing reports to cater to the audience's bad taste. However, on one hand, these reports may cause language violence against professional women, affect their mental well-being, and even lead to sexism. On the other hand, the excessively casual expressions about professional women on the web can lead to the degeneration of the audience's reading habits. The transmission of large quantities of bad news about women will make people more and more immune to negative news and thus their social sympathy and social responsibility may fade away.Finally, two possible solutions are put forward: firstly, the media shall take up social responsibilities of maintaining the correct orientation of public opinion in the process of pursuing their own interests. For web media employees, they shall have the awareness of gender equality and strengthen professional ethics. Secondly, the audience shall also reflect upon the seemingly natural phenomenon by viewing the reportage concerning social gender in a critical way, so as to deal with issues caused by more and more language involvement in social life.