Questioning media reports on human rights abuses: conflict talk in discussing conceptualisations of acts of violence
(2023) 18th International Pragmatics Conference — Location: Université Libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Belgium (9.July.2023)
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- The discursive analysis of the attribution of responsibility of human rights abuses is particularly interesting because it contributes to the understanding of wider social themes such as the construction of memory (see De Cock & Michaud Maturana 2014). However, little attention has been given to the analysis of the attribution of responsibility in conflict talk about a contemporary context. This presentation intends to fill this gap. More specifically, it will focus on conflict talk concerning the attribution of responsibility in Twitter interactions arising from traditional media’s tweets during the 2019 Chilean social protests. In October 2019, the Chilean population started to protest massively in the streets, and the police repression was particularly violent, leading to a large number of human rights violations. Furthermore, a conflict between the press and the protesters arose from this social outburst: journalists were accused of disregarding the abuses committed by State agents. The corpus of analysis is made of tweets published by mass media during the Chilean social outburst that have been the source of conflictual interactions on Twitter about the attribution of responsibility, and their replies. For instance, on January 29, 2020, a man was run over by a national police truck after a football game in Santiago. The television programme Teletrece published the following statement “Camión de Carabineros impacta a hombre [Carabineros truck hits man]”. This tweet received more than a thousand replies because of the diminished responsibility of the perpetrators that the sentence seems to imply by using camión ‘truck’ as subject. Consequently, people tended to reformulate this statement by emphasizing the agents involved and the intentionality of the action (e.g. use of matar ‘to murder’), and by intensifying the statements (e.g. use of exclamation marks and capital letters). The analysis seeks to understand how people react to these tweets and interact in order to defend their point of view and manage the conflict. We are consequently looking at the attribution of responsibility and the agentivity (given that both concepts are intrinsically connected (Villalba Ibáñez, 2017)), as well as the linguistic mechanisms used in order to mitigate or intensify conflict talk concerning the attribution of responsibility (Albelda & Briz, 2020; Albelda & Estellés, 2021). We will then annotate the statements as to explicit or implicit mention of the agents, intentionality of the action and presence of intensifying or mitigating strategies, thus offering a more comprehensive perspective on how conflictual views are expressed in this context.
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Pécher, S. (2023). Questioning media reports on human rights abuses: conflict talk in discussing conceptualisations of acts of violence. 18th International Pragmatics Conference, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Belgium.