Whodunit? Tracing Culpability in Animal-Killing Constructions

Linguistic distancing strategies have been well documented for accounts of human-on-human violence, but relatively little empirical work has been undertaken on the discursive representation of animal-killing. This paper takes inspiration from Givón’s (1983) basic concept of referential distance to measure the syntactic distancing of agents (killers) and patients (victims) from the predicator of a killing construction. Using Sealey and Pak’s (2018) thematic corpus of animal-related discourse, and generating a manually annotated dataset of 1,682 instances of killing constructions across 14 verbs, this work represents an empirical approach to identifying distancing strategies in discourses of animal-killing. The findings indicate a correlation between high referential distance and human agency, as well as a demonstrable distancing effect from the use of the passive voice. Animal victims, unlike other patient types, are more likely to be highly distanced from acts of killing, and verbs with higher levels of polysemy (less semantic predictability and weaker association with killing) were less typical in their agent/patient distancing behaviours.