Officers file motions to dismiss case in black man's death

[Igel]

3. One important thing in formal linguistics is to notice asymmetries.

"The victim gets individuated and named and humanized, while the accused are "officers", in the AP article's title."

Is this a true statement?

Yes. Also, note that headlines are typically cataphoric, esp. in follow-up stories. You're objecting to cataphora in the case of Gray, but not the officers.

All the rest of what I'd say follows from pursuing the asymmetry, and figuring out why the information structure of the article is as it really should be. Now, if you want the article to have a different purpose, perhaps that's a problem and be reflected not just in the information structure expected but also the semantic representation of the name. That, too, would produce asymmetries in production.

Old information media focuses on news. New information goes first. The event here is the filing, and for that you have a two-place predicate. Gray's not one of them. Somewhere down in spec of CP of a complement to the complement to a predicate you get Gray. His death is old news. It shows up just to specify the topic in detail; it has no status as comment.

For me, "Freddie Gray" as a semantic representation along the lines of "the black man who died in police custody last year in Baltimore and whose death made the national news." That's it. Not very emotional, no strong connotations, and not very personal. I know nothing else about him and, to be frank, have no more interest in him than in 7 billion other people. For many, somehow the idea he's a symbol of police injustice or racial injustice that the speaker identifies with personally gets worked in there (the "say your name" motif is built on that). It's a symbol different from the usual sound/referent symbolic representation. In some ways, he's more iconic than indexical, and in some ways more complex. But it's in no way more humanizing; if anything, to a great extent it fends of humanizing. Michael Brown was humanized despite all attempts, and couldn't be a good symbol--too much baggage, too many flaws, and his positive traits ("going to college&quot turned to lead. Good symbols mustn't have serious flaws that can't be explained away.

For me, demoting Gray to background information in a story featuring new content is expected; he's not central, and, in fact, if he were never named at all there'd be no great gap in the information--heck, naming the three officers does nothing for me, but they're strongly implicated so they have greater justification for being named. But if your semantic representation of Gray's name is different, then that's going to be exposed in an asymmetrical reaction to the normative discourse structure and use of anaphoric relations in writing the headline. It's okay to demote the three humans to "officers", but not okay to demote another human to "black man" because that dehumanizes him. The article has to be about Gray.

And we're back to asymmetries, because some things can be discussed explicitly and other things must not be.