Abstract
The aims of this paper are twofold. First, following Halliday’s 1998 paper ‘On the grammar of pain’, this study maps the lexicogrammatical resources available to Spanish speakers in the register of hard news to construe death and killing. Based primarily on a 250,000+ corpus of news reports of violent actions by illegal armed groups in the internal conflict from four major Colombian newspapers, it distinguishes between congruent and metaphorical construals of death, accounting for the different roles of the participants involved in these different types of constructions. In addition, it offers a topological perspective of the intersection of the more delicate distinction of process types and the system of Agency. The second objective is to apply these findings to contrast the construal of violence by the actors in the conflict, Marxist guerrillas and right wing paramilitaries. The results of the analysis show how the deployment of lexicogrammatical resources construes different semiotic spaces, highlighting the role of one group while diminishing the responsibility of the other.
Highlights
To those familiar with the Systemic Functional literature, the first part of this title will certainly evoke that of Halliday’s 1998 paper ‘On the grammar of pain’
Given the centrality of the construal of experience through language to Systemic Functional Linguistics, it is important to explore how other critical domains of human experience are construed in language, and in the lexicogrammar of particular languages
One of the aims of this paper is to contribute to this task by exploring another key domain of human experience: ‘death’
Summary
To those familiar with the Systemic Functional literature, the first part of this title will certainly evoke that of Halliday’s 1998 paper ‘On the grammar of pain’. Apart from the victims themselves, the minority opposition parties and Human Rights activists, Colombians indifferently accepted the ‘Justice and Peace Law’, which punished paramilitaries responsible for countless massacres with a maximum of 8 years of prison (The Centre for Justice and Accountability). Both of these groups (FARC and AUC) carried out indiscriminate and targeted attacks against the civilian population in a ruthless war for territorial and economic control. Based on the M_COP corpus, Section 2 will map the lexicogrammatical resources to construe death and killing while section 3 will contrast the selection patterns in the reporting of the crimes of each group
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