"Unfortunate" expressions or differentiation strategies in Argentine media and political speeches

Abstract

Language, as a social construct, configures and reproduces representations of national identity/s. In this article, we work with a corpus of statements made in mass media and political speeches, and we analyze their pragmatic and linguistic aspects in order to demonstrate the operability of such statements in the language-identity relationship. The focus of interest is to investigate the construction of subjectivities around the idea of "nation", taking as an axis, according to the territorial level, the "inward"(distinguishing between the center and the periphery) and "outward" orientations (divided into the local and the foreign.) The analysis allowed us to conclude that the perpetuation of a frame of reference (the center) is characterized by a lack of distinctive features and results in the exclusion of the regional and the ethnic from the Argentine. Consequently, instead of presenting a deficiency, a conception of purity is reproduced in the language, apparently independent of the historical-political conditions that forged it.