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

• Published in: Journal of pragmatics 2021-11, Vol.185, p.73-92
• Main Authors: Meluzzi, Chiara, Pinelli, Erica, Valvason, Elena, Zanchi, Chiara
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Argument structure; Backgrounding; Cognitive grammar; Corpus analysis; Corpus-assisted discourse studies; Discourse analysis; Domestic violence; Gender-based violence; Linguistics; Media discourse; Perception studies
• ISSN: 0378-2166; 1879-1387
• DOI: 10.1016/j.pragma.2021.07.023

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. •Different constructions enhance the role of the perpetrator of gender-based violence (GBV).•Corpus analysis on newspaper confirmed the preference for constructions that background the perpetrator.•Passivization and nominalization strategies reduce the directedness of the perpetrators' responsibility.•Readers' perception confirmed that third entities like jealousy are assigned responsibility in passives and nominalizations.•The backgrounding strategy produces a focus-change altering the perception of the GBV perpetrator and of his degree of guilt.