The representation of Social Actors in the discourse of the magazine Caros Amigos

Abstract

This paper intends to verify how the images of the social actors corporate media, magazine Caros Amigos, and the readers of the magazine are constructed in the discourse of the magazine itself. Our intents is to analyze the discourse conveyed in the so called alternative (or independent) media, especially considering the construction of the opinion expressed. This paper follows the Systemic Functional Linguistics by Halliday (1985) and Halliday and Matthiessen (2004), and the Social Semantics System as developed by Van Leeuwen (2008) from the SFL. To reach our goal we have analyzed in our PhD dissertation the representation of Social Actors highlighted in fifteen editorials and three op-eds in Caros Amigos. In this article, we present an overview of the representations in all the corpus, as well as a specific analysis of two of the editorials: “Caminhos” (March 2003) and “A linha de frente” (October 2007). We have noticed that one of the strategies to express opinion in this discourse is the way in which the representation of the social actors is linguistically established, especially the corporate media, the most frequent social actor in our corpus. The corporate media is mainly represented through categorization; it is referred to as if it were one only homogenous institution. Moreover, it is recurrently assessed through representations which reveal criticism against the lack of journalistic ethics.