The conceptualization of agents in human rights abuses
(2022) CogLing Days 2022 - Language, Discourse and Cognition: Interdisciplinary Approaches — Location: Tilburg University, Tilburg, Netherlands (8.December.2022)
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- Abstract
- The discursive analysis of human rights abuses seeks to understand how these events are constructed and represented in society. It can therefore be of special interest for other disciplines, such as the study of the construction of memory. Many authors have dedicated their work to the discursive analysis of human rights violations. For example, Christine Anthonissen and Jan Blommaert (2007) and Annelies Verdoolaedge (2005) work on the discourses published in the context of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In the Hispanic context, the analyses tend to focus on the traumatic experiences with dictatorship that many countries had to face during the 20th century, for example Argentina (Pascual, 2017), Uruguay (Achugar, 1999; 2009) and Chile (Oteíza & Pinto, 2008; Oteíza, 2017, 2020), some of which from a cognitive linguistic perspective (De Cock & Michaud Maturana, 2014, 2018; De Cock, Michaud Maturana and Ruiz Zúñiga, 2019). Whereas the authors mentioned above investigate past events, our project analyses the recent abuses that took place during the Chilean social protests of 2019. The project focuses on a particular aspect of the discursive construction of human rights violations, namely the conceptualisation of the attribution of responsibility to the perpetrators, in a corpus made of human rights reports (published by Amnesty International and the United Nations Human Rights Office) and official criminal lawsuits. The main research question is the following: how do the discourses about human rights violations attribute responsibility to the perpetrators? In order to answer this question, we will analyse how the agent is conceptualised in the different discourses. Indeed, an explicit agent can be considered as responsible for his actions, whereas the mitigation of agentivity (use of the passive voice or of the Spanish se impersonal construction, for example) reduces the responsibility of the agent (Pizarro Pedraza & De Cock, 2018; De Cock & Michaud Maturana, 2014; 2018). One of the aims of our investigation is therefore to develop a taxonomy of agentivity that could be applied to any Spanish discourse on human rights violations. Based on the analysis of Barbara De Cock and Daniel Michaud Maturana (2014, 2018), various criteria are going to be taken into account when developing this taxonomy: the presence or absence of agents in a given sentence, and if they are present, their syntactic function and the degree of explicitness of their references. In this presentation, I will focus on one of these aspects, namely the references, in order to study their impact on the attribution of responsibility. Indeed, Van Leeuwen (1996) identifies different strategies to represent social actors (genericisation and specification, nomination and categorisation, functionalization and identification, etc.). These strategies can lead to different representations of the agents, and therefore to different representations of their responsibility in the events described. Consequently, the corpus will be analysed using the taxonomy of Van Leeuwen (1996) in order to identify the different ways in which agents of human rights violations can be conceptualised in discourse. I expect to find in the corpus different representations of the agents, with more explicit references in the complaints than in the human rights reports.
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Pécher, S. (2022). The conceptualization of agents in human rights abuses. CogLing Days 2022 - Language, Discourse and Cognition: Interdisciplinary Approaches, Tilburg University, Tilburg, Netherlands. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/213254