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In Italy, gender-based violence (GBV) is a pervasive phenomenon, rooted in slowly-fading gender-based stereotypes and reflecting asymmetrical power relationships between men and women. This paper investigates how GBV is represented in a corpus of news reports from four Italian local newspapers and focuses on how certain argument structure constructions (i.e. active transitives, passives, anticausatives, reflexives, causatives, and nominalizations) can contribute to diminishing perpetrators’ responsibility. Argument structure constructions shape the event in discourse and, thus, critically bias interpretations of events by foregrounding, backgrounding or suppressing participants. Using UAM Corpus Tool, we annotated (i) all argument structure constructions representing GBV events in our corpus, (ii) the explicit linguistic expression of the main participants in these events (i.e. the victim and the perpetrator), and (iii) the semantic roles of the participants in the event (e.g. Agent and Patient). Constructions that favour the Agent’s backgrounding and suppression turned out to be particularly frequent in the reporting of the type of events which we investigated. The mismatch between the Agent in discourse and the actual perpetrator of the GBV event was further highlighted by the paucity of constructions that foregrounded perpetrators. Finally, even within these few constructions, other discursive details contributed to framing the event in ways that backgrounded perpetrator’s responsibility and foregrounded victims’ implied co-responsibility. Overall, our analysis of argument structure constructions confirms what other investigations have already shown: the main focus of GBV reports is on victims, while perpetrators are backgrounded and relieved of their greater actual share of responsibility. |
