Language as a tool of animal oppression : Exploring agency in the representation of farm animals
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| Year of publication | 2016 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The paper explores the representation of farm animals in the language of everyday news articles from an ecolinguistic standpoint. It tries to shed light on how animal identity is constructed in these texts, focusing on features connected to transitivity and agency attribution. Drawing on theories developed within critical language studies, the paper also incorporates insights from cognitive linguistics when interpreting textual features and their relation to how we perceive farm animals. It demonstrates that these animals are often inappropriately represented in Agent positions and made responsible for complications arising from human-initiated actions while human responsibility is being concealed or erased. |
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