Family Portrait: A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Discursive Construction of Traditional Families

Abstract

Grounded in the understanding that identity is a negotiated concept shaped by discourse and agreed upon by participants in a given social context (Benwell & Stokoe, 2006), this investigation centres on the discursive construction of the notion of ‘traditional family’, and how it is contested and shaped through discourse. To achieve this aim, the study adopts a corpus-based approach (Baker, 2006; McEnery et al., 2006; McEnery & Hardie, 2012), analysing data collected from Twitter to interpret how ‘bondable’ values (Zappavigna & Martin, 2018; Balirano, 2020) associated with the discursive online construction of the ‘traditional’ are shared and reproduced in these online environments. Special attention is paid to the construction of digital landscapes for culture-specific communities of affective practice (Döveling et al., 2018), in order to understand how alignments and meanings are negotiated through SNSs practices (Zappavigna & Martin, 2018). Through this analysis, the study identifies discursive loci that define the linguistic practices adopted by online communities in shaping the discourses around the ‘traditional family’. The findings of this study contribute to the understanding of how discourse shapes and reinforces heteronormative values and the marginalisation of non-normative identities in society. The study also sheds light on the role of online environments in the construction and reproduction of discursive norms related to the ‘traditional family’.