The discourse construction of the most affected subjects by the housing problem in Buenos Aires city: critical analysis from Converging Linguistic Approaches Method

ABSTRACT

The paper discusses the housing crisis in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires, a phenomenon that particularly affects the socioeconomically vulnerable. The paradigm adopted is the interpretative, with Critical Discourse Analysis as a theoretical framework and qualitative methodology. The Converging Linguistic Approaches Method is adopted. By studying a corpus of relevant legal texts, this paper explores the way in which the poor are constructed as subjects in City Law No. 3706, the only text where they feature as a dominant focus category. To that end we need to deepen our understanding of the way in which the linguistic and discursive category of the poor as actors/subjects is constructed in the text. This paper also aims to show the ways in which linguistic discourse enquiry may use a qualitative analysis tool to shed light on social issues.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing crisis
• Autonomous City of Buenos Aires
• interpretative paradigm
• Critical discourse analysis
• Converging Linguistic Approaches Method

Acknowledgement

The author would wish to thank Mónica Descalzi, who translated this paper into English.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Mariana C. Marchese graduated as a Doctor of Linguistics at the University of Buenos Aires, having previously received a Licentiate of Arts as well as a Secondary and Higher Education Teacher’s degree from the same institution. She works as an assistant professor at the Philosophy and Arts School and a researcher with the National Council for Scientific and Technological Research of Argentina. Dr Marchese taught law-making techniques and administrative writing at the Buenos Aires City Hall and Legislature, and was part of the team charged with producing the Handbook of Law-Making Techniques by the Argentine Institute for Standardisation and Accreditation. She is a member of the Latin American Critical Discourse Analysis Network.

Notes

1 Photographs by the author.

2 The 1994 amendments to the Argentine Constitution granted executive and legislative autonomy to the City. In 1996 the first Constitution of the ACBA was enacted, the first City Legislature having been installed the following year.

3 As Pardo (2011) points out, an utterance may or may not coincide with a sentence, proposition, or clause. Following the most functionalist branch of the Prague School, and Firbas’s (1966) notion of communicative dynamism, she defines it as a discourse unit made up of a theme and a rheme. In Spanish the theme would be the point of departure, and the path speakers walk down to achieve their communicative goal would be the rheme. Utterance length may vary, and syntactic rules are not always observed.

4 Translator’s Note: ‘Que me sirva para’ has been rendered as ‘that’s fit for’, a present indicative verb form having been substituted for the Spanish present subjunctive ‘sirva’. The idea of adequacy for a purpose is conveyed by the adjective ‘fit’.

5 Pardo does not equate argument with syllogism, but, based on Toulmin’s (1958/2003) study of argumentation and language in use, defines it as a ‘data structure’ (Pardo, 2011, p. 56) that supports a discursive stance.

6 This operation bears no relation to the ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ concepts.

7 In written texts, a full stop signals the actual end of the utterance. In the legal genre, however, other punctuation marks are sometimes employed, such as a colon or semicolon.

8 MP stands for material process, and AC for material process actor.

9 The use of adjectives as nouns constitutes a systematic feature of the corpus. Translator’s note: the Spanish adjective ‘beneficiarios’ may also be employed as a noun.

10 The examples are representative of the analysis of the general corpus, but have been taken from my 2008–2014 research project.

11 Translator’s note: The implied subject of the utterance is the GACBA.

12 The dominant focus categories in the 3 texts that do not follow the general trend, i.e. the remaining 10.71% of the corpus, are, among others, space and housing emergency. They will not be discussed in this paper.

13 Information available at http://proyecto7.org.

14 The remaining finite processes amount to 20% (existential processes) and 10% (mental processes) of the total.