The evaluation element in the Moroccan narrative of women subject to marital violence

This article addressed the following question: how do talk shows represent women subjected to marital violence? It concerns the way in which the media text acts to construct these women’s identities. The extract we analyzed, which constitutes the media text that we reduced to the bare minimum to get access to the messages transmitted by one of the women subjected to marital violence, was accessed in a Moroccan talk show called Qesst Nnass (the story of people) in the Moroccan TV station Medi I TV. We treated this text as a narrative because it acts like a cognitive tool that mediates discourse and society. Dealing with this media text as a narrative has given us a chance to see how it is structured and how each part of this structure serves a definite purpose(s). A special focus was set on one structural element: evaluation. Its importance emanates from the insights it affords to the researcher about the psychological, cultural, social, economic, legal, etc variables of discourse.

Keywords: Violence; women; discourse; evaluation; Labovian structure