No description available.

This study on the representation of immigrant women in the news investigates three questions: How often do immigrant women appear in the news? In what roles are the immigrant women presented and what issues do they speak about? What are the relationships between those involved in the news features? The research has been conducted through the use of content analysis in combination with the qualitative approaches of semiotics and discourse within a framework of the theoretical perspective of intersectionality. Additional theories in the study are considering the global tendencies and the media, the social construction of news, us & them and stereotypes, as well as feminist media studies. A sample of 15 programmes each of the public service prime-time television news programmes Rapport and Aktuellt, a total of 30 hours, provides the material for this study.The findings of the content analysis indicate that immigrant women are underrepresented in numbers in the Swedish public service television news, and that when immigrant women are speaking in the news, they are more likely to speak about international issues than about Swedish domestic issues. Further, the study finds that most immigrant women are presented in the roles of “immigrant” and mother, while very few immigrant women are speaking in the role of expert/professional. In the qualitative part of the research, it is argued that the report on “Rosengårdsskolan” is consequently building on stereotypically constructed media discourses around the victimized immigrant women, the “ethnification of poverty” and the “racification of the city”. As a contrast, the report on “Adel och hans familj” is displaying a different viewpoint in its aim to depict a well-integrated family in exile in Sweden, but, nevertheless, the immigrant women are informationally backgrounded in contrast to the men in the report.One of the main conclusions of this study is that the immigrant women, and especially the non-European women, appearing in the Swedish television news, are so scarce that their mere appearance becomes loaded with stereotypes, myths, symbolism and prejudices. The findings of the study suggest that the possibilities for immigrant women to get their voices heard and take part in the setting of agendas in the mediated public sphere in Sweden, seem very small.

At the very heart of variationist Sociolinguistics is the notion that language has an underlying structure, and that this structure varies according to external linguistic variables such as age, gender, social class, community membership, nationality, and so on. Specifically, this study examines variation in initial and final segments, as well as sentence final particles in Cantonese in Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR). Results of this study indicate that external linguistic constraint categories play a role in the realization of how and when initial and final segments, as well as sentence final particles are used in Macau Cantonese. Finally, this dissertation illustrates that pragmatic functions in the systematic use of linguistic variables requires explanations that draw from variationist sociolinguistic research that has an ethnographic and interpretive basis. / Linguistics / M.A. (Sociolinguistics)

At the very heart of variationist Sociolinguistics is the notion that language has an underlying structure, and that this structure varies according to external linguistic variables such as age, gender, social class, community membership, nationality, and so on. Specifically, this study examines variation in initial and final segments, as well as sentence final particles in Cantonese in Macau Special Administrative Region (SAR). Results of this study indicate that external linguistic constraint categories play a role in the realization of how and when initial and final segments, as well as sentence final particles are used in Macau Cantonese. Finally, this dissertation illustrates that pragmatic functions in the systematic use of linguistic variables requires explanations that draw from variationist sociolinguistic research that has an ethnographic and interpretive basis. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / M.A. (Sociolinguistics)