Abstract
The US Supreme Court ruling on the Obergefell v. Hodges case on June 26, 2015 led to the recognition of same-sex marriage in all fifty States, declaring it a constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment. The event received huge media coverage and gave rise to animated discussions on digital media platforms. In this context, if the fear of isolation due to spirals of silence (Noelle-Neumann 1974) is increasingly subdued thanks to the anonymity and ephemeral nature of the online environment, studying how users communicate on social media platforms can help researchers highlight how discourses on given minorities are linguistically conveyed in this fluid environment (Zappavigna 2012, 2013). Drawing on these observations, our investigation will focus on how the US Supreme Court ruling was framed by social media users. A corpus was collected of all Facebook comments related to the first news story reporting the event published online by leading US, UK and Italian newspapers. This Facebook user-generated corpus on marriage equality (FugMar) was then uploaded to the corpus analysis platform Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff et al. 2004, 2014) to analyse the discourses surrounding the event in a fluid and boundary-free environment such as that provided by new digital media in relation to news framing. The analysis of the news values (Fruttaldo and Venuti 2017), (Venuti and Fruttaldo 2017), which discursively construe the event in the newspapers, and the way they have been, or have not been, picked up by social media users when they discursively respond to and construe the event, enable us to reflect on the relationship between an event, its news framing, and the echo the framing has on audiences through social media. Ultimately, given the cross-cultural nature of the corpus under investigation, the following contribution sets out to compare and contrast how users discursively construct the US Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage in the US, UK and Italy.
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Notes
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The choice of lempos rather than word forms stems from the need to compare English and Italian language data. Due to the highly inflectional nature on the Italian language, focusing on word would have prevented the identification of comparable keywords.
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Venuti, M., Fruttaldo, A. (2019). Contrasting News Values in Newspaper Articles and Social Media: A Discursive Approach to the US Ruling on Same-Sex Marriage. In: Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B. (eds) Contacts and Contrasts in Cultures and Languages. Second Language Learning and Teaching(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04981-2_11
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