A critical discourse analysis approach to news discourses and social practices on race in Brazil

Abstract

In this paper I set out from Brazilian social theories on race to analyse a contemporary corpus of news reports in a Brazilian broadsheet newspaper. The aim is investigating change in mediated discourses on race. Based on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and with the help of corpus linguistics methodological tools I focus on lexical items used to categorise race, the semantic relations created and their association with discourse representation in the newspaper. The combined analysis of semantic relations and interdiscursivity has allowed for the perception of tensions over the use of terms from different semantic fields to categorize race and of conflicting discourses of race classification in the paper. The analysis has also allowed for a cautious interpretation of dialogicality and of different orientations to racial difference, following the social research inventories in Fairclough (2003) in the reports. KEY-WORDS: race classification; semantic relations; interdiscursivity; dialogicality; race discourses.RESUMO: Neste trabalho parto de teorias sociais sobre a questão racial para analisar um corpus de reportagens contemporâneas de um jornal brasileiro de grande circulação. O objetivo é investigar a mudança nos discursos mediados sobre a questão racial. Com base na teoria da Análise Crítica do Discurso (ACD) e com o suporte de ferramentas metodológicas da lingüística de corpus, focalizo os itens lexicais usados para categorizar raça e as relações semânticas que estes constroem associados com a representação de discurso no jornal. A análise combinada das relações semânticas e da interdiscursividade permitiu perceber que há uma tensão no uso de termos de campos semânticos diferentes para categorizar a questão racial e discursos conflitantes sobre a classificação de raça no D.E.L.T. A., 22:2, 2006 (275-301) 276 D.E.L.T.A., 22:2 jornal. A análise também permitiu uma interpretação cautelosa da dialogicidade e das diversas orientações para a diferença racial, utilizando os inventários de pesquisa social de Fairclough (2003).

“Aspirations of people who come from state education are different”: how language reflects social exclusion in medical education

“…After this initial CL analysis of the data for frequency list and concordances, the data was divided into categories of representation to further understand how students and their social contexts were being represented or categorized (e.g., Magalhaes 2006;Stubbs 1997). This included an examination of how the students were referred to by participants (e.g., in terms of their education, family, location/social class).…”

A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press

“…Sometimes, the corpus is used as a repository of examples (Flowerdew, 1997), as opposed to the analysis adhering to the 'principle of total accountability' (Leech, 1992: 112), that is, accounting for all the corpus instances of the linguistic phenomena under investigation. 5 CDA studies making use of corpora have, in general, tended to avoid carrying out quantitative analyses (see also Stubbs, 1997), preferring to employ concordance analysis (Magalhaes, 2006). 6 When collocations (see Section 4) are examined within CDA research, they are not usually statistically calculated, but established manually through sorted concordances, and information regarding their statistical significance, the collocation span, or any frequency thresholds, is not usually provided (Piper, 2000;Sotillo and Wang-Gempp, 2004).…”

“…Ooi (2001: 179) suggests that 'the optimal size [of a corpus] can be reached only when the collection of more texts does not shed any more light on its lexicogrammatical or discourse patterning'; however, in the studies surveyed, there was no indication of such a concern in the corpus-building process. Finally, the corpus compilation may be flawed, in that the resulting corpus may not be representative (Meinhof and Richardson, 1994, cited in Stubbs, 1997, or, in extreme cases, the corpus may be biased (Magalhaes, 2006). 8 However, there is a developing body of work which not only draws on both CDA and CL, but also aims to do justice to both, such as the studies by Baker and McEnery (2005) and Orpin (2005), as well as studies balancing CL and other discourse-oriented theories/methodologies, such as conversational analysis (Partington, 2003), moral panic theory (McEnery, 2006), sociolinguistics (HardtMautner, 1995;Mautner, 2000Mautner, , 2007, evaluation/appraisal (Bondi, 2007), stylistics (Semino and Short, 2004) and language and sexuality (Baker, 2004a).…”

A Sociolinguistic Analysis of Word-Final /s/ Aspiration in a Rio de Janeiro Favela

“…Despite the difficulties in approaching race relations in Brazil, this discussion has appeared as a central element in studies in other areas of Linguistics, such as Interactional Sociolinguistics (Flannery 2005(Flannery , 2008a(Flannery , 2008b, corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis (Magalhães 2006), Ethnolinguistics (Castro 2001;Mendonça 2012), and Language Contact (Guy 1981(Guy , 1989(Guy , 2014Lucchesi 2001;Lucchesi, Baxter & Ribeiro 2009;Naro & Scherre 2007). Even though these studies have made invaluable contributions to the study of the intersection between language and race in Brazil, one can conclude that the effect of race/color or racial identity remains understudied in BP sociolinguistic variation.…”