354 | nº 31, pp. 341-360 | doxa.comunicación
July-December of 2020
The digital ecosystem during the COVID-19 Crisis: new normality and lockdown easing and lifting
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
1. The action and effect of confining.
2. Formal: A punishment consisting in sending a prisoner to a safe place where he can live freely, but under the surveillance of the authorities.
There is also reference to the adjective confinado/a (confined) as:
1. Exiled.
2. Formal: He who is sentenced to confinement.
As to the online version of the DLE (2014), the verb confinar has the following definitions:
1. adj. Pertaining to a person: Condemned to live in an obligatory residence. Also used as a noun.
2. m. and f. Legal. A person who is sentenced to confinement.
Therefore, to free someone from confinement is the pragmatic sense linked to the semantic conception of desconfinar.
From the comparative analysis of the two consulted sources it is possible to arrive at the following conclusions:
1) That in both sources the meaning of the concept of confinamiento is akin to that of ‘punishment’.
2) That the Diccionario Enciclopédico Universal (1990) offers many nuances that specify the need for the authorities to supervise the punishment and includes the adjective confinado alluding to banishment, which does not appear in the DEL.
These conclusions are useful for performing a pragmatic analysis on the euphemism desconfinamiento, in which the following features are noteworthy:
Table 5. Pragmatic analysis of desconfinamiento
Pragmatic analysis of desconfinamiento
It implies immediate optimism and refers to a liberation as regards the lifting of the state of alert, which the citizenry have experienced in a way similar to an imprisonment.
It displays and denotes an ideological bias in favour of those allowing lockdown to be lifted. If to confine is synonymous of imprisonment, to intern under the surveillance of the authorities, even with the power to impose fines, desconfinamiento implies a liberation from that imprisonment which is unilaterally attributed to the laws in force that allow the authorities to lift lockdown, thus reversing the situation of deprivation of liberty and surveillance of those confined to their homes. All this tends to point to an auspicious denouement, since it contributes to reinforce the idea of a return to normal and of stability.
It evokes improvement, progress and freedom, since it also implies having got over and left behind the sentence of confinement.
Its purpose is to transmit a sensation of control in order to alleviate or counter an unpleasant and precarious situation, insofar as it suggests putting an end to an exceptional state of affairs thanks to the addition of the prefix des- and its genuine meaning of ‘returning to a previous situation or state’, namely, putting paid to the precariousness.
It is disseminated via the digital ecosystem on a massive scale.
Source: own elaboration
