Modalidade e identificação na construção discursiva dos direitos humanos na contemporaneidade

Abstract

The study proposed here focuses on the discursive analysis of emerging forms of identification in texts representative of the law on human rights and emblematic of institutional struggles for its implementation. To this end, we examine the category modality, as an indication from which a language user participates (engages) in his message, expressing attitudes and judgments of various kinds (EGGINS, 1994). The theoretical framework is Norman Fairclough’s (1992, 2003) Critical Discourse Analysis, in its operationalization of Halliday’s (1994) postulates of Functional Systemic Linguistics, for a framework of language as an irreducible part of social life. The data indicate that the forms of modality used in normative texts, of prescriptive nature, denote a process of emptying the figure of the subject. Peremptory affirmations, prohibitions, and commitments are consistent with the construction of a truth regime, a commandment order whose ultimate legitimacy is rooted in an absolute truth, an ontology. The most significant ideological effect is objectivity and naturalization, as foundations for maximum representativeness. Already the texts that substantiate the struggle for rights, exhibit linguistic marks of subjectivity (firstperson verbs and indicative of mental processes, intensifying adverbs), making them more admittedly political, designating the historical agents involved in the process of meaning construction for rights humans.