The Language of Evaluation in the Narratives by the Magdalene Laundries Survivors: The Discourse of Female Victimhood

Abstract

Drawing on Martin and White’s Appraisal Theory, we study the language of evaluation in a corpus of interviews selected from the archives of The Magdalene Oral History Project. Apart from being deprived of proper food, clothing, and their identity, many of the women who spent their lives in Ireland’s Magdalene institutions had been, or were, sexually assaulted, and physically and psychologically abused. Their criminalization led them to long-lasting incarceration for no apparent reason and, years further on, prevented them from developing any active social voice. Thus, the discursive patterns in these texts can be seen as the symptom of ‘the discourse of female victimhood’, which is mainly characterized by their difficulty to express their emotions and their opinions, and their tendency to avoid mentioning what happened to them and who the agent was. The Magdalene survivors felt both hatred and remorse, and seemed to be able to speak about their painful experience only by silencing others’ liability, while making self-reproach and sympathy go hand in hand in their construal of both their past and themselves.

A critical discourse study of the representation of immigrant women in a sample of the Spanish press: between victimization and prostitution

“…This means the analysis is systematic (Baker et al 2008;Gries & Berez 2017;McEnery & Hardie 2012;Partington et al 2013). In this sense, CL is very useful for a critical discourse analysis (Baker 2006(Baker , 2009(Baker , 2010a(Baker , 2010bHidalgo Tenorio & Benítez Castro 2020) due to the objectivity of this method to study how language is used, as Gabrielatos and Baker (2008: 7) make clear: 36 Corpus linguistics methodology allows for a higher degree of objectivity-that is, it enables the researcher to approach the texts (relatively) free from any preconceived notions regarding their linguistic or semantic/pragmatic content. When the starting point is keyword analysis, the analyst is presented with a list of words/clusters which will then be examined in (expanded) concordances for their patterning and contextual use.…”

Historical Gendered Institutional Violence: A Research Agenda for Criminologists

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Redefining attitude for studying explicit and indirect evaluations of human behaviour

“… See Fuoli and Hommerberg (2015) andFuoli (2018) for a discussion on the design of a clear annotation scheme and intra-and inter-reliability checks to diminish subjectivity in the evaluation analysis, and an application at Hidalgo-Tenorio and Benítez-Castro (2020Castro ( , 2021.…”