A modalidade deôntica na construção da persuasão em discursos políticos

Abstract

The study aimed at investigating in which way linguistic expressions of the deontic modality act in a sense of making the audience’s participation possible in standpoints defended in political speeches and, thus, it was analyzed, under a functionalist theory, forty-four speeches delivered by Representatives at the Lower House of Congress. They discussed the reformation proposal on the welfare state along the first semester of the year 2003. Being understood as the modality related to the axis of the obligation, the deontic modality is, in the present research, as a whole, analyzed under the manifestation of syntactic, semantic and pragmatic-discourse aspects. The research revealed the existence of a relation between the reformation process’ stage, what is directly related to the social pressure over the politicians, and the usage frequency of deontic modalizator expressions. Concerning the linguistc means of the deontic modality expression, one could perceive a high production of the modal verb, standing out the verb “must” in the consolidation of obligations. One could also observe a high frequency of the lack of a target’s explicitation in which the deontic value was established as well as an exclusion strategy in relation to the target, when the latter was specified. The politicians’ preference for presenting themselves to the public as the ones who took the responsibilities in a task execution, or for making the audience believe that this responsiblity belongs to somebody else, weakens the audience’s pression over the politician’s figure, then transferring this responsibility to other individuals or to institutions. For these reasons, in general terms, one can observe the politicians’ preference for keeping some distance from the established deontic value’s incidence target.