Responsibility attribution in gender-based domestic violence: A study bridging corpus-assisted discourse analysis and readers' perception

Abstract

This paper investigates how argument structure constructions (see e.g. Goldberg 1995) are used by Italian newspapers to portray gender-based violence (GBV), how their usage affects responsibility attribution to perpetrators, and how such usage is perceived by Italian readers. The assumption is that constructions critically affect meaning: constructional choices prompt different viewpoints of the same event. For the corpus study, we collected 40 articles from local newspapers and annotated 720 constructions denoting GBV events. Constructions suppressing/backgrounding the perpetrator or depicting the event as a bare happening were the most frequent. Building upon these results, for the perception study, 274 participants read an author-constructed news report portraying GBV and answered four speculative questions about the identity of the perpetrator and the victim. Respondents were divided into groups and each group was presented with a stimulus article containing different constructions of the GBV event surrounded by the same information frame. In line with previous studies, it was found that the perpetrator could be assigned less responsibility when the passive and nominal constructions were employed.

Introducing a Gold Standard Corpus from Young Multilinguals for the Evaluation of Automatic UD-PoS Taggers for Italian

“…For instance, Te Brömmelstroet (2020) shows that media in the Netherlands frequently report on traffic crashes by foregrounding the more vulnerable participants (e.g., pedestrians or cyclists), while backgrounding car drivers. A similar pattern has been observed for news reports of femicides in Italy, where the victim tends to be foregrounded and the perpetrator backgrounded Meluzzi et al, 2021).…”

Can Language Influence Health Decisions? The Role of Foreign Language and Grammatical Structure

“…Similarly, Meluzzi et al (2021) investigated the effect of grammatical structures on attributing responsibility to offenders. Participants read a media report about gender-based violence and responded to four speculative questions about the offender and the victim.…”

A Common Derivation for Parsing and Generation with Expectation-Based Minimalist Grammars (e-MGs)

“…It has been shown that the variability of linguistic expressions used to describe an event impacts the reader's perception of the event and its social significance. Previous work in psycholinguistics shows that in events involving violence (at any level), the linguistic backgrounding of agents hinders their responsibility and promote victim blaming (Huttenlocher et al, 1968;Bohner, 2001;Gray and Wegner, 2009;Zhou et al, 2021;Meluzzi et al, 2021). For instance, Te Brömmelstroet (2020) shows that media in the Netherlands frequently report on traffic crashes by foregrounding the more vulnerable participants (e.g., pedestrians or cyclists), while backgrounding car drivers.…”