Interdiscursivity and conflicting discourses on race in Brazilian news reports

Abstract

In this paper I set out from debates on the racial issue in Brazilian social sciences to analyse a contemporary corpus of news reports of a major Brazilian broadsheet newspaper. My aim is the investigation of change in mediated discourses on race. Based on a combination of the theoretical and methodological tools of CDA with a corpus linguistics tool I focus on keywords used to refer to skin colour, the lexical relations created around them and their association with intertextuality in the newspaper. The combined analysis of lexical relations and intertextuality has allowed for the perception of tensions over terms of race and colour and of conflicting discourses of race classification in the paper. The analysis has also allowed for a cautious interpretation of dialogicality and thus of different orientations to racial difference in the reports.