Sexual violence and legal control: a critical view of three sentence extracts on cases of violence against women

Abstract

In this paper I intend to do two things: first, I will investigate the global organisational structure of three extracts from Brazilian sentences on cases of violence and sexual abuse against women. Second, I will analyse, in one of the three extracts, the notion of grounding, i.e., how the information contained in the extract is divided into more relevant and less relevant facts and events. My aim in carrying out these two kinds of analysis is to investigate how linguistic devices (both at the micro and macro textual levels) help to convey sexist, phallocentric messages in the discourse of the criminal justice system. As far as the methodology is concerned, I will base the analysis of the global structure of sentences on the situation-evaluation pattern (WINTER, 1994), and the analysis of grounding on the concepts and categories presented by Cheng (1991). The analyses results indicate that legal texts from the criminal justice system construct discriminatory subject positions for women.