The discursive construction and attributions of motive in relation to the Chilean student movement (2011-2013) in the national news genre (80,947 words) Carolina Pérez Arredondo, BA, MA Thesis submitted to Lancaster University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2017 Declaration I hereby, declare that this thesis is my own work and that, to the best of my knowledge, it contains no material which has been accepted or submitted for the award of any other degree or diploma. Abstract Carolina Pérez Arredondo, BA, MA. ‘The discursive construction and attributions of motive in relation to the Chilean student movement (2011-2013) in the national news genre’. PhD Thesis, Lancaster University, December, 2017. This thesis investigates how motive is linguistically and discursively constructed in news reports of the Chilean student movement. In particular, I analyse how these constructions of motive are recontextualized, represented and attributed to legitimize and/or delegitimize the actions associated with them. The corpus under study consists of a specialized corpus containing news articles about the student movement, drawn from seven major newspapers over a three-year span (2011-2013), sub-categorized into conservative and alternative press. The analysis builds upon my personal adaptation of van Leeuwen’s work on purpose and legitimation to analyse motive in the news genre. I combine this adaptation with positioning theory and corpus-assisted methods. Methodologically, I propose a three-step method to analyse motive in the news genre that consists of (1) an analysis of grammatical realizations of motives; (2) position analysis in order to identify the most common storylines with which the educational issues being contested are framed, and how the actors are positioned within them; and (3) a keyword and collocation analysis to identify the ideological struggle presented in these news reports in terms of representations of motives and (de)legitimation strategies. The results show that the inclusion, exclusion and recontextualizations of motive can be used to subvert and/or normalize social representations of the students. While no differences emerge in the ways grammatical structures are used in both the mainstream and alternative presses, semantic and discursive resources are used differently in order to legitimize and delegitimize the motives of the actors involved in the conflict. Finally, the corpus analysis helped to triangulate the results obtained in the qualitative analysis. This method contributed to the identification of motive through social actor representation, as opposed to social action representation. Therefore, it consolidated the methodological approaches I propose in this thesis. Acknowledgments This PhD thesis is the product of the support and assistance of many people, both in Lancaster and Chile. I have experienced personal, professional and academic growth throughout the last few years and I will be forever grateful for your presence in my life. I gratefully acknowledge the Chilean government and their scholarship program Becas Chile (CONICYT) for their financial support throughout my postgraduate studies. I would like to express my very great appreciation to my supervisor, Greg Myers, for his academic guidance, his witty humour, his always helpful and insightful comments in the margin of my chapters, and for being the serene presence to my always-in-crisis self. I would also like to thank Professor Alison Sealey and Professor Chris Hart, for their comments and advice at different points of my PhD. I especially thank them for giving me the opportunity to grow professionally and academically through the projects in which they invited me to participate. My special thanks go to Marjorie Woods, who had a much bigger presence in my life than she realized. I am particularly grateful to Ana Maria Burdach, my undergraduate supervisor, for believing in me and advising me to pursue my post-graduate studies at Lancaster University. I am grateful to the Chilean National Library for their assistance with the collection of my data. I would also like to thank the Facultad de Letras at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile for their assistance in the realization of my pilot focus group. In particular, I want to thank Lésmer Montecino whose comments and guidance on how to pilot my materials were invaluable. I would also like to thank Claudia Correa, for providing the facilities to collect my focus group data. More importantly, I would like to thank my participants who were willing to share their experiences. Please know that, although I was forced to remove your chapter from this thesis, this is currently being edited for its publication at an academic journal. Quisiera también agradecer a mi familia por su apoyo y amor incondicional a pesar de no entender a cabalidad qué y por qué decidí seguir especializándome. Agradezco a mi mamá, por inculcarme el amor a la lectura; a mi papá, por apoyarme incluso en esas situaciones en las que no estaba muy de acuerdo; a mi tía, por inculcarme el amor a los idiomas; a mi Né, que siempre quiso que fuera doctora (médica, pero igual cuenta); a mi tata por la exigencia; a mi Nina y Tata Juan, por el apoyo incondicional; a Vivi, por su ayuda y generosidad infinita cuando ni siquiera me conocía. Asimismo, quisiera agradecer a la familia Vidal-Quiroga, en particular a la Sra Gloria, Lore y Cathy, quienes siempre se han preocupado de hacerme sentir parte de su familia. Friends are the family we choose and the cornerstone of your sanity when you are miles away from home. Throughout this process, I have felt the love and support of both my friends at home and the ones I made on the way. Thus, my heartfelt thanks must go to Cristi, Pili, Nury and Andres for the unconditional support, understanding, and company during the (many) crises and achievements I faced throughout this roller coaster. To Ele, for the complicity that has kept me going until today. To Kristof and John, who were the best housemates I could have ever hoped for. To Margarita, for the kind of cynicism only Chileans can understand (and miss) while at Lancaster. To Stephen, whose cakes were almost as sweet as he was to me. To Dani, for indulging ourselves in those cakes every Thursday. To Sten, for the chocolate and sport adventures. To Camila, for the intellectual stimulus. Finally, I also want to thank the friends I met at Lancaster (Carolina, Cael, Daniela, Gabriel, Jose, Amanda, Vittorio, Federica, Virginie, Mariam and Jing) for all the fun and making my stay much more enjoyable. Finally, I owe my deepest gratitude to Lalo. To this day, he refuses to believe the impact his endless love and support has had throughout these years and in the completion of this thesis. I fail to describe the importance he has had in my life and I will be forever grateful to him for believing in me, and in us. I love you. Table of Contents Chapter 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................ 1 1 Background and researcher’s motivation .................................................................. 1 2 Aims of the study ...................................................................................................... 5 3 Organization of the thesis ......................................................................................... 8 Chapter 2. The Chilean student movement: an overview .................................................. 11 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 11 2 From classrooms to the streets: students as social vigilantes ................................. 14 3 The aftermath of the dictatorship in the educational and communicational sectors ............................................................................................................................ 15 3.1 The national educational system: an overview ................................................ 15 3.2 The national media: media regulated by the market ........................................ 17 3.3 Alternative media against concentration of media ownership ......................... 19 4 “La educación chilena no se vende, se defiende”: Students post-dictatorship ....... 20 4.1 ‘The Penguin Revolution’................................................................................ 21 4.2 ‘The Chilean Winter’ ....................................................................................... 22 4.3 Student movement and social media ............................................................... 23 5 Summary ................................................................................................................. 25 Chapter 3. Literature review .............................................................................................. 26 1 Introduction ............................................................................................................. 26 2 Social movements ................................................................................................... 27 2.1 Social movements and the media .................................................................... 30 2.2 Social movements and emotions ..................................................................... 35 3 Motive ..................................................................................................................... 36 3.1 Motive in the social sciences ..........................................................................