Publications
Publication details [#14591]
Busso, Lucia, Claudia Roberta Combei and Ottavia Tordini. 2019. La Rappresentazione Lessicale della Violenza di Genere: “Donne Come Vittime” nei Media Italiani. In : 261–279. 19 pp. URL
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
Italian
Keywords
Place, Publisher
Edizioni Università per Stranieri di Siena
ISBN
9788832244021
Abstract
This study aims at contributing to the debate on gender violence by analyzing the lexical choices of Italian news media, which allow to potentially unveil latent attitudes and stereotypes. In particular, the investigation focuses on the representation of the woman as a victim, both in oral and written discourses, and it adopts a data-driven and corpus-based approach in order to integrate quantitative and qualitative analyses in both corpora. By using text-mining techniques, the authors are able to confirm that crime news sections regarding gender violence use a standard register, characterized by neutral terms and an objective expository style, which mostly reports the elements that regard crimes, often disregarding the victim’s side. Analyses in TV representations of gender violence, instead, reveal that metaphorical instances are preferred to describe the subjects involved in the event, whereas the use of iconic strategies is often essential to talk about physical or psychological violence. On the contrary, newspapers reveal a less rich metaphorical lexicon, given the intrinsic characteristics of newspaper language and the typical lack of a complex perspective in crime news sections.