The Grammar of Blood and Violence in Journalistic Writing in Ciudad Guayana: from Linguistics to Ethics in Crime News

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to characterize the crime news in one of the most violent cities in the world. In order to do so, a methodology of critical-descriptive grammatical analysis and systematization of the writing be applied, in the light of grammar, spelling rules and criteria of both classical, and contemporary linguists and journalist-linguists. These subcategories can be used in another journalistic source of any other Spanish-speaking media and will also provide a linguistic diagnosis of the writing style. Although applied linguistics is used, the focus will be journalistic and grammatical. The corpus is comprised by 149 crime news, from which both their titles and the story bodies have been taken into account for the analysis. This research will reflect the ethical implications of, for example, the use of the passive voice and the gerund or the omission of quotation marks.