Who empowers the Cuban people?: Agency and agentivity in the media

Abstract

This article employs qualitative and quantitative analysis to examine how semantic roles are used to construct a hierarchy in U.S.-Cuba relations in recent articles from U.S., Miami, and Cuban newspapers. I study how social actors, such as the Cuban government, the Cuban people, the U.S. government, U.S. citizens, and U.S. businesses are mapped to different semantic roles, and how various newspapers ascribe agency to these different entities. The findings reveal asymmetries in semantic roles occupied by different participants in the sociopolitical sphere and show how Cubans and Cuban-American relations are constructed in the media, by illuminating power structures encoded in language meant for broader consumption, highlighting the importance of semantic role analysis and implementation of quantitative methodologies in discourse analysis.