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Part of
Emotion in Discourse
Edited by J. Lachlan Mackenzie and Laura Alba-Juez
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 302] 2019
► pp. 335–356

Chapter 13
Victims, heroes and villains in newsbites

A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Spanish eviction crisis in El País

| Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Spain)

This chapter explores, from a systemic-functional perspective, the role that emotional meaning plays in the press representation of news actors in the Spanish housing crisis. By drawing both on the Appraisal framework and on the transitivity distinctions made in Systemic Functional Linguistics, 139 newsbites published in the Spanish newspaper El País and tagged with “desahucios” (“forced evictions”) were collected and analyzed. Descriptive statistics were used to describe the results. Findings show that: (a) El País triggers emotional responses from their audience by representing social actors in the eviction crisis as emotionally suffering victims, as sympathetic heroes or as dehumanized financial and political villains, and (b) journalists strategically use emotional meaning as encoded in verbal processes to highlight the differences in the press representation of the main news actors in the Spanish eviction crisis. These results contribute to a deeper understanding of the social issue under analysis and are discussed in relation to previous literature in Critical Media Discourse Analysis.

Keywords: newsbites, Spanish, eviction crisis, emotional meaning, news actors
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Emotions in the written press
  • 3.The present study
    • 3.1Research questions
    • 3.2The context: The case of the news on Spanish “desahuciados”
    • 3.3Method, data and procedure
      • 3.3.1The transitivity system
      • 3.3.2Appraisal Theory
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2News actors’ social role in the conflict
    • 4.3Language choices to represent news actors
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 March 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.302.13alo
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