Over the last few years, several laws in Western European countries have given homosexual couples different degrees of legal recognition. In the UK, for example, the Civil Partnership Act (2004) recognised same-sex ‘civil unions’, while in Spain the 2005 amendment of the Civil Code granted full marriage rights to gay couples. These legal measures, along with social movements for sexual equality, evince the existence of a new discursive reality where meaning is recursively and strategically negotiated in the light of intervening ideological stances and enacted social roles being constantly redefined. Besides, we analyze the discourse prosody and semantic constellations surrounding naming practices applied to same-sex couples and the (counter-)discourses that (de)ligitimise conceptual representations in the media. In this paper we combine critical discourse analysis and lexical pragmatics to analyse key semantic sets regarding naming practices for ‘actors’ (e.g. gay couples, homosexual couples, partner, etc) and ‘relationships’ (e.g. matrimonio homosexual, matrimonio gay, pareja de hecho, homosexual couples, civil partnership, same-sex partnerships, etc) drawn from a comparable (ad hoc) corpus of news articles of two Spanish (El País, El Mundo) and two British newspapers (The Guardian, The Times), each pair showing progressive vs conservative ideological stances. Data is then contrasted according to such variables as number of articles, focus (i.e. if the topic is addressed directly or the terms are marginally used), and frequency of the semantic sets under analysis. The results show that semantic instability stems from a fierce ‘discursive’ battle to lay down highly ideological terms.Over the last few years, several laws in Western European countries have given homosexual couples different degrees of legal recognition. In the UK, for example, the Civil Partnership Act (2004) recognised same-sex ‘civil unions’, while in Spain the 2005 amendment of the Civil Code granted full marriage rights to gay couples. These legal measures, along with social movements for sexual equality, evince the existence of a new discursive reality where meaning is recursively and strategically negotiated in the light of intervening ideological stances and enacted social roles being constantly redefined. Besides, we analyze the discourse prosody and semantic constellations surrounding naming practices applied to same-sex couples and the (counter-)discourses that (de)ligitimise conceptual representations in the media. In this paper we combine critical discourse analysis and lexical pragmatics to analyse key semantic sets regarding naming practices for ‘actors’ (e.g. gay couples, homosexual couples, partner, etc) and ‘relationships’ (e.g. matrimonio homosexual, matrimonio gay, pareja de hecho, homosexual couples, civil partnership, same-sex partnerships, etc) drawn from a comparable (ad hoc) corpus of news articles of two Spanish (El País, El Mundo) and two British newspapers (The Guardian, The Times), each pair showing progressive vs conservative ideological stances. Data is then contrasted according to such variables as number of articles, focus (i.e. if the topic is addressed directly or the terms are marginally used), and frequency of the semantic sets under analysis. The results show that semantic instability stems from a fierce ‘discursive’ battle to lay down highly ideological terms.