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Part of
Discourses on the Edges of Life
Edited by Vicent Salvador †, Adéla Kotátková and Ignasi Clemente
[IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature 26] 2020
► pp. 49–66

The gift of continuing to live in the body of someone else

The discourse on organ transplants in Spanish press

| Universidad de Almería
This paper aims to identify the main discursive types used when talking about organ transplants and to observe the presence of the concept of death in these types. We will summarize the main lines of research on this issue and proceed to analyze a sample of journal documents on transplants published in the newspaper El País in two different stages (1976–1986 and 2006–2016) and in which ‘death’ appears in the headline or in the subtitle. The analysis is aimed at locating main themes, basic arguments and lexical structures used to refer to death in this information framework.
Keywords: critical discourse analysis, death, organ transplants, health communication, El País
Article outline
  • 1.Presentation
  • 2.Organ transplants and discourse
    • 2.1The number of organ transplants
    • 2.2Textual frameworks of organ reception
    • 2.3The organ donation discourse
  • 3.The discourse on transplants in the Spanish media: The Example of El País
    • 3.1Discursive types
    • 3.2Macrostructure
    • 3.3Mesostructure
    • 3.4Microstructure
  • 4.Some concluding remarks
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 9 April 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ivitra.26.04ban
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