Activists’ responses to (lack of) agentivity in headlines: a study of the 2019 Chilean social outburst
(2023) Discpol23: Discourse and politics in times of crisis — Location: En ligne (11.April.2023)
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- Abstract
- In recent years (2019-2022), Chile underwent massive social protests against the government and in favour of a new Constitution. In this context, the State repression was particularly violent and hundreds of human rights violations were perpetrated. Simultaneously, activists accused the press of focussing only on the protesters’ violence in news coverage, consequently disregarding peaceful protests and the abuses of State agents (Scherman & Rivera, 2010). On Twitter, activists therefore tended to reformulate the tweets of traditional media that they considered poorly written, in particular regarding the attribution of responsibility for violence towards protesters. This presentation intends to shed light on this type of activism from a linguistic perspective. For instance, on January 29, 2020, a man died after being ran over by a national police truck, and the television programme Teletrece published the following headline: “Camión de Carabineros impacta a hombre [Carabineros truck hits man]”. This tweet received many replies due to the fact that it seems to diminish the responsibility of the police by using the verb ‘hit’ and an inanimate subject ‘truck’. Activists therefore complained about the lack of agentivity in this sentence. The concepts of agentivity and responsibility are indeed intrinsically related (Villalba Ibáñez, 2017), which is why the discursive construction of responsibility for human rights abuses has been studied essentially in view of the notion of agentivity (e.g. De Cock & Michaud Maturana, 2014). This presentation will thus analyse how agentivity is conceptualised in traditional media headlines published on Twitter during the Chilean social outburst and in their replies. The aim of this presentation is to identify the discursive patterns of responses from activists to (lack of) agentivity in headlines. In order to do so, we will consider various criteria, such as the nature of the reference to the perpetrators, its syntactic function and the verb semantics.
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Pécher, S. (2023). Activists’ responses to (lack of) agentivity in headlines: a study of the 2019 Chilean social outburst. Discpol23: Discourse and politics in times of crisis, En ligne.