A expressão da evidencialidade no discurso político: uma análise da oratória política da Assembléia Legislativa do Ceará

Abstract

The present research aims at investigating the expression of evidentiality and its relation to the degrees of public speaker’s commitment with the contents uttered in political speech argumentation’s construction. Thirty speeches, subdivided in two thematic groups: 1) the arrival of a petrol refinery in the state of Ceará; and 2) the transposition of São Francisco River, and delivered in the Small Expedient of Ordinary Sessions in the State legislature of Ceará, from 2005 to 2006, consisted the corpus of analysis. In this work, evidentiality analysis is concerned with the syntactic aspects (linguistic contexts, position in the statement), semantic (type of source, strategy of information’s dissemination in the statement, what is directly related to the way as the speaker desires to demonstrate that he got the information presented by himself) and pragmatic (degrees of commitment of the politician with the content of his speech, elicited images in the argumentative process, discursive roles assumed by the items of evidence). We support the hypothesis that factors of conceptual, interacional and contextual order, as the communicative intentions of the politician, the conditions of production and the image that this politician desires to construct of himself before the audience, condition the evidentiality manifestation, the type of evidential qualification, as well as the (lack of) commitment’s effects of meaning from the politician with his speech. We adopted, mainly, the functionalist theoretical basis, in which the user assumes a central role in the inquiry; the linguistic description includes, therefore, reference to the speaker, to the listener and to their roles and statutes defined in the verbal interaction (DIK, 1989). The results reveal that, in political speech argumentation’s construction, the use of evidences marks from the cited defined type of source prevails, proving that the politician prefers not to commit himself to the reported information, assuring to the interlocutor this responsibility to evaluate the validity of the information, in accordance with the quality of the expressed source. With regard to the evidential marks that we assume as referents of the speaker’s axis (inferential and subjective experiences), we verify that, although in lesser amount, they constitute important strategies in the construction of political action’s legitimating images, since the speaker shows confidence in his ideas and projects. Concerning the morphosyntatic aspects of the evidentiality, we observe that the verb is the way of more frequent expression of this category, occupying, mainly, the intercalated position (between the source and the declared content).