A Diachronic Study of People.cn's Construction of Female Ph.D. Students

Within the framework of Wodak's Discourse-Historical Approach, the present study adopts a corpus-based method to explore People.cn's diachronic construction of female Ph.D. students. Concordance and collocation analyses reveal that the People's attitude towards female Ph. D. students changes from being negative to being neutral. Moreover, both stages focus on specific female Ph.D. student while the second stage pays more attention to generic ones. Overall, reports in People.cn negatively construct their out-group images in marriage, employment, EQ and heath and positively represent their in-group images in work, IQ and appearance, with their images in values changing from out-group to in-group. The dynamic construction of female Ph.D. students embodies that People.cn abides by its particular ideology and value stance in different periods of time to represent different aspects of female Ph.D.