Racism and Football: A contrastive study of the representations of social actors in the media

Abstract

This paper is a study based on the field of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), more specific on the theory of Representation of Social Actors by Theo van Leeuwen (1996). A contemporary bilingual corpus in Spanish and Portuguese, composed of newspaper articles online access, which addressed a case regarded as a racist act between two football players, one Argentine and Brazilian was collected. Through the identification and tagging of different modes of inclusion and exclusion of social actors represented in the corpus, and with the aid of tools and methodological criteria of Corpus Linguistics and contrastive studies, we analyze the different discursive strategies employed in representation of one another player, as well as cultural aspects related to the two countries. The empirical approach coupled with technological resources used, and the theory adopted allowed a more critical, reflective and descriptive view of the facts, which implicate historical and cultural aspects of the countries involved.