The representation of ‘the measurable’ on poverty in the Colombian press

Abstract

This article illustrates the representations of poverty in the Colombian press. It explores the way the linguistic resource of quantification guides the constitution of meanings about poverty. The main hypothesis of this article is that quantification in economic discourse is reproduced in a segmented, general, context-free form in the press. This creates a sense of validity, sustained by the sense of the reliability of anything quantifiable or measurable. This sense has been historically attributed since modernity and with the growth of scientific investigation. Thus, the conceptualization of the phenomenon of poverty is fragmented, minimized, and without context, hiding the particularities of the subjects involved. We examine the construction and other characteristics of these meanings through a study of the different types of quantifiers and identify the following implied socio-discursive strategies: thematization, focalization, generalization and minimization, among others. These strategies activate social knowledge that may guide, control and regulate social action. The corpus analyzed in this article consists of news articles published between 1991 and 2006 in two national newspapers (El Tiempo, and El Espectador) which have the following words in any of the headlines or leads: poor, poverty, indigence, indigent, or those expressions that include the mentioned lexical units.