The ideologies behind newspaper crime reports of Latinos and Wall Street/CEOs: a critical analysis of metonymy in text and image

Abstract

This study illustrates how metonymy in image and text work together to produce dominant ideologies in US media discourse, through careful, multidisciplinary analysis of over 25 articles in online US newspapers from the years 2004 to 2011 that reported crimes committed by Wall Street/CEOs and Latino migrants. Using critical discourse analysis/studies, multimodal analysis, and cognitive linguistic frameworks, we examine examples of metonymy, which combine to negatively ‘Other’ Latinos and (re)produce positive representations of Wall Street/CEOs. While work in critical metaphor analysis shows how metaphor plays a crucial role in the depiction of participants and events, we argue that metonymy is equally important and reveals the need for a critical metonymy analysis. These results help to demonstrate the ideological potential of metonymy in media discourse and how it contributes to the public's conceptualisation of these groups, thereby bringing us one step closer to social justice and social change.

Keywords:

• crime reports
• Latinos
• CEOs
• metonymy
• ideology

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Grace Fielder and Richard Ruiz for their help in early stages of this work, as well as Ron Breiger, David Machin and the comments from an anonymous reviewer that led, we hope, to ameliorations of this paper.

Notes

^†A short, earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Association of Applied Linguistics in Boston, Massachusetts, on 24 March 2012.

There are others who incorporate metonymy with analyses that are close to CDA but with no explicit tie to CDA – e.g. Santa Ana (1999, 2002).

Articles were selected within this time frame in order to limit the number of texts due to the scope of the paper, and to keep texts files in parallel time frames.

Google searches were used in order to provide a purposeful sampling of articles reporting crimes committed by both groups examined. To find articles featuring a particular group (such as CEOs or Latinos), lexical terms used to reference each group examined were searched (i.e. ‘CEO’ ‘Latino’ ‘illegal immigrant’ ‘Hispanic’ paired with a term associated with crime such as ‘accused’ ‘convicted’ ‘arrested’).

Images were found in CEO articles Text 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9 and Latino articles Texts 1, 4, 5, 6, 8, 15.

Note that each text is numbered according to its numbering in the appendix and that the headline accompanying the text is given with the number. In addition, examples are numbered according to the text they are from and order of appearance in the paper.

Note also the metonymic use of the nickname ‘Kristie’ for the wife's first name, which creates familiarity/closeness, positive affect, sympathy for her and, by metonymy, for him.

A scrum is a play in rugby in which the two sets of forwards pile together around the ball and struggle to gain possession of it; in this context, it has a negative connotation.

These are examples of what are called ‘grammatical metaphors’ in Systemic Functional Linguistics (see Martin, 1992, pp. 406–417), but they are actually ‘grammatical metonyms’ according to our definition of metonymy.

Notice the use of the nickname ‘Bernie’, which has the same force as ‘Kristie’ in example (5b).

While there are many examples in the literature of metaphor coming from metonymy, there do not seem to be examples of metonymy coming from metaphor (Barcelona, 2011; Benczes, 2011).

Four individuals followed in the next sentence by the four is a typical cohesive device; many cohesive devices, like this one, are metonymic in nature (Al-Sharafi, 2004).