"The Chilean Times' portrayal of the changing role of women after the 1906 earthquake in Valparaiso"

Abstract

The present research intends to depict the way in which women were described in other British newspaper The Chilian Times before and after the 1906 earthquake in Valparaiso, highlighting the shift they experienced as objects in this context. Due to the recent origins of the field of discourse analysis, and to the diversity of issues involved–gender, social movements, historical context and linguistics–different perspectives were applied with the intention of covering the issues involved in the analysis. Thus, the framework presented includes appraisal theory or the study of the language of evaluation in context as purposed by Martin and Rose (2008), Halliday (2014), and gender studies in the case of Litosseliti and Sunderland (2002). To develop the study, articles from the local news section of The Chilian Times were selected from January to December 1906, each one of them presenting women in their texts, an essential condition to be part of the corpus. The selected samples were eclectically analyzed using the above mentioned theoretical and methodological approaches mentioned to portray women as objects in the articles. After the categorization of the discursive markers that revealed the attitude of the newspaper towards women, the results revealed a marked shift of the newspaper’s perspective on women after the natural disaster in 1906, presenting them in a positive way, and even as protagonists in some of the articles.