Critical Discourse Studies

ISSN: 1740-5904 (Print) 1740-5912 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcds20

Approaches to discourses of marriage

Laura L. Paterson & Georgina Turner

To cite this article: Laura L. Paterson & Georgina Turner (2020) Approaches to discourses of
marriage, Critical Discourse Studies, 17:2, 133-137, DOI: 10.1080/17405904.2019.1657030
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2019.1657030

Published online: 23 Aug 2019.

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CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDIES
2020, VOL. 17, NO. 2, 133–137
https://doi.org/10.1080/17405904.2019.1657030

INTRODUCTION

Approaches to discourses of marriage

a
Laura L. Paterson and Georgina Turnerb
a
Faculty of Wellbeing, Education, and Language Studies, The Open University, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, UK;
b
Department of Communication and Media, School of the Arts, Liverpool University, Liverpool, UK
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 8 August 2019; Accepted 14 August 2019

As part of the Discourses of Marriage Research Group (DoM) founded by Dr. Lucy Jones
(University of Nottingham) in 2012, we have been thinking, talking, and writing about
the language of marriage for some time; to date the group has published four papers,
focusing particularly on same-sex marriage debates in the UK. When in 2016 the British
Association of Applied Linguistics (BAAL) put out a call for events in a series in conjunction
with Cambridge University Press (CUP), the idea of an interdisciplinary seminar dedicated
to discourses of marriage seemed a good one. As a group, we knew we were not the only
people looking at the topic – globally, the socio-political landscape was, and still is, shifting
all the time. We expected it would be fascinating to bring a range of scholars together, but
we were pleasantly surprised nonetheless by the diversity and the scope of the abstracts
we received, and those papers that we were able to accommodate in two days of presen-
tations. By the end of the event on September 2017, over coffee in the wood-panelled
library in the University of Liverpool’s School of the Arts, this special issue of Critical Dis-
course Studies had been conceived.
The collection here moves far beyond the scope of DoM, bringing together researchers
from across the globe: there are contributions from scholars working in Belgium (via Cali-
fornia) and Taiwan, as well as papers from UK-based researchers looking at international
contexts, such as Turkey and Germany. Our contributors are not all linguists or discourse
analysts but include psychology scholars, and we are extremely pleased that the papers
herein draw on a range of analytical frameworks and methods, including corpus linguis-
tics, linguistic landscapes, ethnography, and reflective practice. Their foci, too, are
diverse, from the language of the powerful – government legislation and mass media –
to the relatively powerless or less often heard, such as former child brides, and women
who have never married. Not all of the authors here use precisely the same notion of dis-
course(s), but each paper offers some guidance as to how the term is operationalised.
Beginning this issue, Ursula Kania’s paper on same-sex marriage legislation in Germany
adds to a growing body of literature on media representations of same-sex/equal marriage
debates in different national contexts. Focusing on two key periods from 2000 to 2017,
Kania draws upon corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to investigate
German press coverage of marriage equality legislation. She evidences the different dis-
courses drawn upon by the German media, considers whether pro- or anti-marriage equal-
ity voices are given space, and demonstrates how colloquialisms such as Homo-Ehe
(homo-marriage) came to be accepted and used across media texts as legislation

CONTACT Laura L Paterson laura.paterson@open.ac.uk

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
134 L. L. PATERSON AND G. TURNER

changed. The examples taken from her corpora demonstrate an understanding in the
press that to label same-sex partnerships and opposite-sex marriage as different things
suggests a fundamental difference between the two and leaves ‘a basis for discrimination’.
Furthermore, Kania notes a shift from Homo-Ehe to the phrase Ehe fuer alle (marriage for
all), with the latter – a slogan chosen for pro-equality campaigns – being seen as a more
equal and inclusive term. Kania’s work is a strong addition to the scholarship on same-sex
marriage debates and their relationship to equality. There are similarities between her
findings and the work of other scholars in this field of enquiry, such as the presence of
the slippery-slope metaphor (see, for example, van der Bom et al., 2015) and the fore-
grounding of the perceived relationship between marriage and family (e.g. Turner et al.,
2018). However, there are also points of divergence – such as the relative absence of reli-
gious discourses – and thus her work facilitates cross-linguistic, cross-national, and cross-
cultural comparisons of what marriage is and who can enter into it in the twenty-first
century.
Eric Ku’s analysis of Taiwanese protests at the end of 2016 further expands the scope of
same-sex marriage research, both by bringing a new national context and language to this
special issue and with his focus on the campaign signs used by protestors. After providing
a detailed overview of same-sex marriage debates legislation in Taiwan, he considers the
different primary positions taken up by LGBTQ individuals and their representative insti-
tutions noting that, whilst some see same-sex marriage as equality, others see it as enfor-
cing heterosexual norms onto LGBTQ couples. Ku analyses the interplay between identity
(labels)/identification with particular social groups and the position that sign holders take
on same-sex marriage. He groups his data into a four-way split between for/against same-
sex marriage and LGBTQ/not-LGBTQ identities to emphasise that not all LGBTQ individuals
were pro-same-sex marriage, nor were all non-LGBTQ individuals at the protests anti-
same-sex marriage. Ku draws on the concept of linguistic landscapes to show how protes-
ters who were pro-same-sex marriage used their signs to emphasise the similarity between
opposite-sex and same-sex couples. For example, some men who were in same-sex
relationships used traditionally feminine Chinese characters or invoked the concept of
‘housewife’. For all protesters, these signs were a way to have their voices seen and/or
heard in a public setting. Given that existing linguistics-based research on same-sex mar-
riage debates has largely been restricted to analysing texts produced by those with insti-
tutional power, such as the mass media or legal bodies (e.g. the UK parliament (Bachmann,
2011; Findlay, 2017)), Ku’s paper thus emphasises the importance of researchers engaging
with the language used by those who do not hold legislative power or access to traditional
global communication networks.
Mieke Vandenbrouke’s paper focuses on the role that government employees can play
when enacting marriage legislation, focusing on the investigation of and judgements
made about sham marriages (or marriages of convenience) in Belgium. In particular, she
focuses on cases where couples including a Belgian national and a non-Belgian national
have had their relationships scrutinised by government representatives in order to deter-
mine if that relationship is genuine or not. She considers the role that language plays in
assessing potential sham marriage cases, but also critically evaluates how the language
used in legislative documentation sets out a normative interpretation of what a loving
relationship should look like. Vandenbrouke argues that, as a result, the legislation (and
the practices associated with it) perform a gatekeeping function. She demonstrates how
 CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDIES 135

interviews with marriage applicants are reformulated through language and mode to
transform from a spoken interaction between two (sometimes three) participants speaking
combinations of Dutch, English, French, and Armenian, into a single document written
entirely in Dutch. Furthermore, the extracts from her ethnographic study demonstrate
how some civil servants conducting interviews with marriage applicants were guided
not only by their knowledge of legislation, but also let their own personal views about mar-
riage (and gender roles more broadly) colour their interpretation of the applicants, poten-
tially influencing the outcome of their claims.
While most papers in this issue have focused specifically on marriage, Valerie Hobbs’s
study brings to this collection a focus on religious conceptualisations of divorce (and its
relationship to church attendance). Her paper breaks new ground by focusing on the dis-
courses drawn upon in (primarily) American preachers’ sermons about divorce and, in
doing so, expands the field of the linguistic enquiry of Christian preaching and religious
language. By analysing the key semantic fields present in her corpus of sermons, Hobbs
demonstrates how divorce is portrayed as unacceptable (although some narrow and
specific Biblical grounds for divorce are acknowledged). Similarly, remarriage is only
deemed acceptable in limited circumstances (by some) after the death of a spouse. She
also evidences that the process of divorce is gendered, with men occurring as the
‘primary social actors’ in descriptions of divorce: men divorce their wives, women do
not divorce their husbands. This does not reflect divorce statistics in the US, which
suggest that women are the primary initiators of divorce. Thus, the female agency is back-
grounded in the sermons. Hobbs relates this backgrounding to the fact that the most
common reason for women seeking divorce in the US is given to be some form of
spousal abuse. However, when the pastors delivering the sermons did reference
reasons for divorce, they were far more likely to focus on infidelity (citing supporting
Bible passages) than abuse, a finding that Hobbs claims makes the sermons ‘antithetical
to the reality of divorce’.
Another group not usually considered in research on marriage are women who have
never married; Sergio Silverio and Laura Soulsby’s paper, therefore, targets a hitherto
under-researched population. Situated within psychology, but using language as the
primary target of analysis, they focus on interviews with 12 women in the UK who
never married. Their work draws on feminist poststructural approaches to interrogate
how these women see themselves and how they believe society perceives them. The
authors concentrate on four key areas: the women’s thoughts on being never married;
society’s perception of never-married women; notions of femininity; and the individual
self and life transitions. They draw on the concept of double voicing to demonstrate
how some of the women both accepted their life choices and celebrated their agency
while simultaneously downplaying their achievements, because they were aware that
they had not followed a ‘normative life course’. One important element of this paper is
that Silverio and Soulsby’s research allowed women the space to reflect on their own iden-
tity and have their voices heard in some form of institutional setting. Thus, their research
has potential to empower their participants by encouraging them to define their own
identities and reflect on their own choices, reasoning, and practices.
This potential is also evident in the closing paper in this issue. In it, Eylem Atakav reflects
on the production and impact of her documentary film Growing Up Married, which was
screened at the Discourses of Marriage BAAL/CUP seminar. In her short film, Atakav
136 L. L. PATERSON AND G. TURNER

used unstructured interviews to provide a space for four women who were child brides in
Turkey to tell their own life stories. Her paper includes multiple extracts from the film, pro-
viding a snapshot of the topics it covered. In analysing the interviews through a critical
feminist lens, Atakav notes the importance of acknowledging and reflecting on the pos-
ition of the researcher within research. She considers the power differentials between
researcher and researched and how these can potentially be minimised but never comple-
tely eradicated. Her paper is a thought-provoking read for any researcher considering
moving from analysing media texts to creating them. Atakav concludes her paper by doc-
umenting the real-world impact that her film has made and how she has used it to reach
audiences beyond the boundaries of academia, including government officials and the
police force.
In compiling this issue, we regret that we could not, due to space constraints, include con-
tributions from all the delegates who presented their work at the Discourses of Marriage
BAAL/CUP seminar. However, we wish to thank all of the delegates (some of whom
offered to act as peer-reviewers for this issue) for their contributions to the seminar. We
would also like to thank Dr. Lucy Jones, who was our plenary speaker and gave an excellent
overview of the Discourses of Marriage Research Group’s work to date. We hope that this
special issue introduces new audiences to marriage-based research and provides a push-
off point for future work. Marriage, ideas about marriage, and the component parts of mar-
riage, are not static. Rather, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen
much debate about what marriage is, who has access to it, and how it has changed over
time and in different places. These changes are still ongoing: following a Supreme Court
ruling in October 2018, the UK is set to open up civil partnerships to heterosexual
couples; in the same month a referendum in Romania failed to establish a mandate for expli-
citly excluding same-sex couples from the legal definition of marriage. Same-sex marriage
legislation is still being debated in countries all over the globe including (at the time of
writing) Chile, Ghana, and Japan. There is also further scope for language-based research
on cross-cultural marriage practices, divorce (proceedings, legislation, justification),
forced marriages, and, fundamentally, there is still much debate about whether same-sex
marriage semantically and/or legally constitutes equal marriage.

Notes on contributors
Laura L Paterson is a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and English Language at the Open University.
She is a corpus-based discourse analyst and a member of the Discourses of Marriage Research Group.
She has published work on epicene pronouns, public responses to Benefits Street, and the geo-
graphical text analysis of newspaper coverage of UK poverty (Representations of Poverty and Place,
Palgrave 2019). She is also editor of the Journal of Language and Discrimination. School of
Languages and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Wellbeing, Education, and Language Studies,
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK
Georgina Turner is Lecturer in Media at the University of Liverpool. Her primary interest is in media
representation, with a particular focus on gender and sexuality. She is interested in magazines and
print subcultures, recently collaborating with participants to create a zine during recent work
focused on a romance between two older women on the BBC medical drama Holby City and its
impact on queer viewers’ mental health and wellbeing. Her book, Lesbian Magazine Discourse, is
due to be published by Bloomsbury in 2020. Department of Communication and Media, School of
the Arts, 19 Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7ZG, UK
 CRITICAL DISCOURSE STUDIES 137

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID
Laura L. Paterson http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4832-2629

References
Bachmann, I. (2011). Civil partnership – ‘gay marriage in all but name’: A corpus-driven analysis of
discourses of same-sex relationships in the UK parliament. Corpora, 6(1), 77–105.
Findlay, J. (2017). Unnatural acts lead to unconsummated marriages: Discourses of homosexuality in
the House of Lords revisited. Journal of Language and Sexuality, 6(1), 30–60.
Turner, G., Mills, S., van der Bom, I., Coffey-Glover, L., Paterson, L. L., & Jones, L. (2018). Opposition as
victimhood in media debates about same-sex marriage. Discourse & Society, 29(2), 180–197.
van der Bom, I., Coffey-Glover, L., Jones, L., Mills, S., & Paterson, L. L. (2015). Implicit homophobic argu-
ment structure: Equal marriage discourse in The Moral Maze. Journal of Language and Sexuality, 4
(1), 102–137.