What Men and Women are Said to Be: Social Representation and Language

Abstract

A psychological model was developed in order to analyse concepts of gender role-specific experiences and behaviours, verbalised in media texts. Descriptions of typical man-woman interactions were sampled from West German magazines taken as vehicles of social representations. The texts were analysed with a view to the man's and the woman's contributions to an interaction sequence. A multilevel analytical model enabled the identification of the syntactic and semantic structure of propositions. Elaborating Fillmore's and van Dijk's notion of frame, it was possible to represent interaction sequences by means of verb concepts and subject roles. To specify the content of these relational actions, a hierarchical category system was developed. Results demonstrate that representations of gender-role relationships in media texts still follow traditional cliches.