RESOLVING THE SEMANTIC OPACITY OF A NEOLOGISM THROUGH JOURNALISTIC DISCOURSE:

A CASE STUDY OF THE ‘MOTOCLOCK’ UNIT

Abstract

In recent years, social changes have led to transformations in how crimes are committed, resulting in the creation of new terms for crimes, criminals, and methods to combat them. One notable area of neological productivity is group crime, reflecting a shift towards collective rather than individual criminal activities. The terms emerging in relation to this type of delinquency often exhibit varying degrees of semantic opacity due to their neological nature. It is therefore interesting to observe how these textual micro-units construct their profile based on the macrotext. An example of this is ‘motoclock,’ a term that has arisen to denote a particular type of crime and the associated offenders. This paper analyzed journalistic texts in digital format from 2018 to 2023 that addressed crime and reported on the ‘motoclock’ method. The purpose was to study the discursive elements that contribute to profiling this neological unit from the perspective of discourse analysis. The results showed the presence of names and referents associated with the offenders, along with the use of mediatization and spectacularization strategies, which reinforce the social representation of offenders as an organized group with its own codes. Overall, it was concluded that units with greater semantic opacity rely on discursive elements to be understood by speakers.