The evolution of the discursive construction of female domestic workers in Chile: A combination of critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics

Abstract

This article examines the discursive construction of domestic workers in Chile and aims to unveil how these social actors are linguistically represented over time. To achieve this, I used two different corpora of Chilean Spanish (Codicach (Sadowsky, 2006) and esTenTen11 (Kilgarriff et al., 2014)), which were analysed in the light of Reisigl and Wodak’s (2001, 2009) Discourse-Historical Approach, combined with corpus methodologies (Baker, 2006; Baker et al., 2008). Results evidenced a normalized negative discursive construction of domestic workers, especially the term “nanny”, determined by an asymmetrical power relation in which domestic workers have little impact in how they are portrayed. Although this seems to have been the pattern, at least from the mid 1990’s, a more recent corpus revealed the existence of a resistant discourse which contests these negative associations, presenting domestic workers as socially more empowered.