The Diathesis in the Spanish Sports Press in Catalan and Spanish: A Tool of Exclusion?

Abstract

Partiality and constructions of rivalry are expressed on various levels in Spanish sports newspapers. Based on a corpus of more than 500 newspaper texts, this article examines the extent to which deagentivations through diatheses and rearrangements of semantic roles generate partiality in the Spanish and Catalan sports press in Spain. In these media discourses on the so-called clásico of Spanish soccer, Real Madrid versus FC Barcelona, the ‘other’ team and the ‘other’ footballers are often denied taking the role of an agent. Instead, they are deagentified by resorting to recessive, passive and se-diatheses, in Catalan sometimes carried out as es. The same applies to supposedly altered semantic roles, i.e., the redistribution of the syntactic structure on the surface structure of a sentence could give the recipient of the text the impression that an action or a process has the agent position ―although de facto, of course, it does not― or an apparently intrinsic force that manages without the actual acting agent.