Press releases after forty years of the last coup d'etat in Argentina

  • Julia Zullo Universidad de Buenos Aires
Keywords: press discourse, coup d'etat, dictatorship, ideology

Abstract

What social representations are currently circulating about the last coup d’état in Argentina? Almost twenty years ago, we set out to answer this question by analyzing how the national press reconstructed the main events, actors and cause-effect relationships in referring to the last Argentine military dictatorship. At that time, we set up a corpus with the central news of the moment which had been published by the morning press to commemorate the 20th anniversary of its beginning, on March 24, 1996 (Zullo, 1999). Over the last few years, the question has given rise to other research that addressed pedagogical materials produced for students and primary school teachers (Zullo, 2014, among others). However, the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the dictatorship invites us to rethink the question and to return to what we concluded many years ago. In order to do so, we study a corpus of Clarín and La Nación editions of March 24, 2016 from a global perspective; we undertake a comparative analysis of two editorials that are articulated in three levels: first, the design and the formal organization of the texts and the graphic information of printed editions (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996), dealing with the macroestructural organization of news (van Dijk, 1978); secondly, the axis of the syntactic-semantic organization of the utterances of two articles of opinion from which we determine the participants, processes and circumstances, as well as the frequencies and types of transformations and the processes of over-lexicalization present in these texts (Hodge and Kress, 1993); thirdly, the enunciative dimension (Ducrot, 2001) of these articles, which gives rise to certain types of questioning that both newspapers make to the authorities and to civil society (Trew, 1979). Beyond the differences with respect to the journalistic versions of twenty years ago, we find significant contrasts in the ways of presenting and organizing information in these newspapers in 2016. However, the systematization of these linguistic differences does not allow us to establish ideological differences, since both diaries contribute to the same ideological formation throughout different linguistic strategies (Pechêux-Fuchs, 1975).

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Author Biography

Julia Zullo, Universidad de Buenos Aires

holds a PhD in Language and Literatures, University of Buenos Aires, and is Adjunct Professor of Sociolinguistics and Analysis of the languages of the media at the same University. She is also Editor of Signo y Seña. Journal of the Institute of Linguistics and co-Director of the project “Social representations of young people in Argentina in the social discourses of the last decades: politics, media, advertising, teaching” (UBACyT, Institute of Linguistics, UBA). She is the author and co-author of diverse studies on the production, circulation and consumption of social representations, and current social discourses, in particular, media, historical and pedagogical discourses. She investigates on Critical Linguistics and multimodal events.

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Published
01-12-2016
How to Cite
Zullo, J. (2016). Press releases after forty years of the last coup d’etat in Argentina. Texts in Process, 2(2), 217-236. https://doi.org/10.17710/tep.2016.2.2.3jzullo
Section
Working papers