(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
The analysis should be interesting for linguists, media scholars as well as political scientists. On
the context level, we deal with the semantic macrostructure of articles, theme while on the
content level, news schemata, actual structure and language use. The use of attributes, metaphors
and epithets often demonstrate subjectivity in articles as well. It is significant to have a look at
semiotic and deictic signs illustrated in the articles, which might lead us to elaborate more on
pragmatic intentions of authors.
Method
In order to gather the empirical data a method of random sampling was used. Overall, 50 articles
were analyzed, 30 articles within a period of 2008-2009 and 20 articles within a period of 2006-
2007. For data analysis qualitative methods were used: segmenting, coding and enumeration.
The articles were also analyzed from a linguistic point of view in terms of semantics and
pragmatics on a content level. The major focus was to see whether the given media text
presented an opt material for interpretation and the selected segments carried some implications
in the process of analyzing the context. For this purpose, segmenting and coding were employed
to identify category names and descriptive words while searching for the meaning behind them.
To define how frequently words or coded categories appeared in the data, enumeration was
applied, “enumeration helps qualitative researchers communicate concepts such as ‘amount’ or
‘frequency’ when writing up the results.” (Johnson B. & Christensen L . , 2008, p. 541).
Determining frequencies of words and ideas helped to see the importance of these ideas and
further decode the text.
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