Representation of Gamblers in the Singaporean Press since Casino Legalization: A Corpus-driven Critical Analysis

Abstract

Capitalizing on the lack of gambling-related research among discourse analysts and the recent liberalization of C-A-S-I-N-O operations in Singapore, the present article reports on the discursive representation of gamblers in Singapore newspaper texts by merging corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. 889 articles from the popular daily paper The Straits Times (Singapore) were retrieved via LexisNexis in accordance with a series of criteria. The extracted texts, which were dated from 17 April 2005 to 28 April 2013, constitute the 615 827-word corpus of the current study. WordSmith Tools 6.0 was used to perform collocation analysis, which was enriched by critical examination of the concordance lines. The findings indicate that apart from gender stereotyping, social alienation is manifested in various ways while gamblers are being portrayed. For instance, the pronoun collocate ‘we’ of the node ‘gambler*’ tends to signify the non-gamblers’ voice which is geared towards the institutional stance. The verb collocate ‘say’ is frequently used in contexts where the gamblers are being commented upon or criticized. The analytic outcomes of the research have once again confirmed the ‘hegemonizing’ character of newspaper texts.