Representations for victims, families and public offices in the nightclub Kiss tragedy under the systemic functional perspective

Abstract

This  article  aims  to  analyze  representations  for  social  actors  in  newspaper articles which address the tragedy at the nightclub Kiss, in Santa Maria – Rio Grande do Sul. The theoretical support is the Systemic Functional Grammar by Halliday  and  Matthiessen  (2004).  The  corpus  is  made  up  of  six  articles published in the Diário de Santa Maria and Folha de São Paulo newspapers. The analysis procedures included the analyses of the situation context and of the transitivity system. They showed the following representations: the victims are represented as people who no longer exist; the family members as people
who have lost a relative; and the public offices as guilty for the tragedy.