Enfoque ético-lingüístico del término “ciudadano” en la redacción de Sucesos de Ciudad Guayana (Venezuela)

Abstract

The aim of this study is to analyze the results of the use of the noun «citizen» in the crime stories in Ciudad Guayana, in the south of Venezuela. This research is founded on both moral philosophy and linguistics (Suárez Montoya, 2020a, 2021). It is evident that the grammatical questions go way beyond a statement. For this matter, semantic analysis and critical hermeneutics (Conill, 2010) were used to reflect on concepts such as the noun «citizen» (Cortina, 2001) in one of the most dangerous cities in the world. The corpus was comprised of 149 news stories from four newspapers; this interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work depicts the incidences in a subcategory called improper meanings. The finding: in some of these journalistic texts, there is what has been called in this article «moral disinformation» because there is no semantic-moral correspondence: there are constructions -in two of the four newspapers analyzed- that tend to link the «citizenry» with «delinquency». May this textual analysis serve to nurture journalistic discussion about one of the pillars of democracy: the «citizen».