‘I thought you didn’t accept gay marriage fr’: Combining corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis to investigate the representation of gay marriage and the irish mammy stereotype in mrs brown’s boys

This chapter explores how corpus linguistics (CL) and critical discourse analysis (CDA) can be used in a mutually beneficial way to investigate the portrayal of gay marriage in the popular television series ‘Mrs Brown’s Boys’ and in the lead-up to the Irish Referendum on Marriage Equality (2015). Our discussion not only emphasises how CL can help to enhance and support CDA in terms of its shortcomings, a point that is often raised (Mautner 2012), but also looks at how CDA, in turn, can support the analysis of corpus findings. In particular, we look at the use of CDA in offering analysts a way of understanding the complex relationship between language, gender, and sexuality that often unfolds and plays out way beyond the concordance line and against very specific sociocultural and political contexts where context is key.