Linguistics and Argentinian Recent History: An interdisciplinary analysis of the category ‘violence’

Abstract

The word violence is central to the Argentinian recent history as it conveys a pervasive concept of past social experience, being also used to recollect and historicize that experience. This article proposes an interdisciplinary approach between history and linguistics, in particular between recent history epistemology and lexical semantics, to probe into whether the lexical item violencia corresponds to a scholarly category or not analyzing its lexical combinatory patterns. One of our basic assumptions is that the concepts scholarly/native category from history correlate with the distinction term/word from terminology. We also contend that the linguistic behavior of a word makes it possible to characterize it semantically. The present analysis considers three corpora from Spanish: a general corpus, a press corpus from the 1970s – as the primary sources –, and a scholarly corpus from the field of study of recent history. Our hypothesis is that ‘violence’ is an intermediate category between a native category – coined by ordinary social actors – and a scholarly category – coined by the scholars who study history – in recent history. Support for this is provided by the behavior of violence in those three corpora. The paper thus contributes to the epistemological study of recent history considering one of its key analytical categories on the basis of linguistic data.

Keywords: native and scholarly category, term, recent history.