La representación de los “recursos naturales” en la prensa

El uso de las nominalizaciones en crónicas de Clarín sobre Minera La Alumbrera

Abstract

We will analyze the coverage provided by the newspaper Clarín, from Buenos Aires, on a case of mining exploitation in the northwest of Argentina (Minera La Alumbrera, in the province of Catamarca). The corpus selected covers ten years, from the moment in which the mining field was opened to the prosecution of the Vice President of the company in charge of that exploitation due to environmental pollution. Within the framework of Critical Linguistics (Fowler et al, 1983), we will analyze transformations in sentence structure, particularly the nominalizations exploitation, filtration, spill, breakage, pollution and their verbal versions. We will give special importance to the position of nominalizations in the sentence, the processes they are associated with and the actors that are deleted in the transformation of clauses (Hodge & Kress, 1993). This article intends to contribute to the denaturalization of social representations of natural resources in the mass media and understand the discursive struggle between this and the new representations that arise in the framework of environmental organizations.