Grammar, Discourse and Ideology: The Representation of the Venezuelan Migrant in the Peruvian Press

Resumen

Within the framework of Peruvian media discourse, the figure of the Venezuelan migrant has frequently been associated with criminal practices, constructing a stigmatised and persistent representation. This article aimed to analyse such representations from a linguistic perspective, employing Halliday’s system of transitivity within the framework of systemic functional grammar. A qualitative methodology was used, based on the analysis of a corpus consisting of headlines and excerpts from Peruvian print media. The classification of processes—material, verbal, relational, mental, and existential— made it possible to identify the various roles assigned to the migrant in discourse (actor, goal, sayer, receiver, carrier, attribute, phenomenon, existent) and the associated ideological implications. The findings show that grammatical structures operate as mechanisms of ideological construction, even when the migrant does not appear as the direct agent of the process. The analysis demonstrates that transitivity is a key tool for revealing how language configures and reproduces social representations of control, exclusion, and criminalisation.