A symbol of barbarism and shame. Predications of violence in Chilean mainstream press about the social outbreak

Abstract

This article studies the meaning’s shifts of the word violence in mainstream written press in Chile’s social outbreak context. To do so, it analyzes linguistic mechanisms and discursive strategies used by the media, such as nominalization and nomination. The corpus consists of op-eds published by El Mercurio and La Tercera in October-November 2019 and October 2020. The results illustrate the semantic and referential specialization of the term, considering both the lexical and discursive meaning of its cotexts, and the morphological and syntactic mechanisms of attribution or reinforcement of agentivity.