Attitude and Identity Categorizations: A Corpus-based Study of Gender Representation

“Identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions” that are said to be its results” (Butler 1998: 25). This study examines verbal expressions of gender identities in online personal ads by Malaysian adults. This paper focuses on methodological issues that demonstrate the ways in which themes relating to gender are represented in a corpus of online personals collected from my.match.com. This concern is explored from a social semiotic perspective and aims to present a systematic and replicable linguistic analytical framework for analyzing identity construction in a corpus of texts, both quantitative and qualitatively, based on a combination of systemic functional linguistics frameworks (Halliday, 1994; Martin & White, 2005), social actor categorization (van Leeuwen 2008) and corpus linguistic tools (Scott, 2004; O’Donnell 2008). Features of identity categorization and attitudinal expressions were identified and qualitatively analyzed in relation to femininity and masculinity. The systematic contrasts between identity categorizations and ATTITUDE types construe distinguishing semantic themes, which define one type of gender identity in opposition to another. As such this study is a contribution to scholars working in the area of gender, discourse analysis and social semiotics as it demonstrates the interaction of identity categorizations and attitudinal expressions through a corpus-based analysis of personal ad texts.