Poverty’s Agent: The Framing of Poverty and Responsibility in Colombian Newspapers

Abstract

This article examines, by way of linguistic analyses, to whom or what Colombian newspapers assign notions of responsibility, cause or blame when they address the topic of poverty. It is our assumption that specific attitudes may reveal themselves in linguistic patterns (among other things). Here, we examine the verbs that appear with the word pobreza (poverty) as syntactic and semantic argument. Specifically, we examine the agent, or highest argument of the different verbs in detail, since the agent is the initiator of the verbal action and thus has the potential of accepting responsibility or blame for the action described.