This paper presents a corpus-based case study on the linguistic construal of armed conflicts on the parallel corpus Grande Sertão: Veredas and The Devil to Pay in the Backlands. Drawing on Halliday’s (1998) and on Pagano and Figueredo’s (2011) explorations of how human experiences are transformed into meaning through language, this study is designed to analyze the lexicogrammatical resources employed to construe the experience of conflict in Portuguese and in English. The results point to the experience of conflict being construed as a Participant in Material Clauses, characterized by being a permanent entity in the temporal axis and by being able to actualize Processes and to take part in different Processes. Moreover, the results indicate the Conflict is construed as a self-governing entity—configured as if it could start, develop, and end itself, independently from human beings involved.