Uma análise textual do pathos em polêmicas

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate textual strategies used to mobilize pathos in polemic argumentative texts. With this purpose, initially, we take as premise the dialogue between the Argumentation in Discourse (Amossy, 2018 [2006]), and the Textual Linguistics, proposed by Cavalcante (2016) and deepened in Macedo’s (2018) thesis, which suggests the understanding of the (inter)discursive argumentation in standards of textuality. Subsequently, we critically discuss several studies from authors who investigated pathos in argumentation - as Ungerer (1995), Micheli (2008a, 2008b, 2010), Plantin (2008, 2010), Charaudeau (2007, 2010) and Amossy (2017, 2018), besides Aristotle (2012) – aiming to base the pathos concept that meets best the interests of our research. Due to having suggested a linguistic study to investigate pathos beyond grammar marks, our research took two standards of textuality – the referential processes (MONDADA; DUBOIS, 2016 [2003]; CAVALCANTE, 2011) and the intertextual processes (CARVALHO, 2018) – in order to emphasize and explain how the appeal to pathos happened in texts. To build our corpus, we took as premise that the conflict between discursive clashes can only be comprehended in text relations and that the polemic only stablishes in an intertextual dialogue (CAVALCANTE, 2017). In that way, ten posts were selected, five from O Globo newspaper and five from O Estado de São Paulo newspaper, of years 2018 and 2019, with news that reported declarations of the Pope Francis regarding issues related to sexuality and abortion. As from this selection, the corpus embraced in this study was formed of the mentioned news shared in the newspapers’ posts on Facebook and of comments of each post. The results confirmed our basic hypothesis that the referential and intertextual processes can demonstrate the mobilization of pathos in texts. For this reason, we proposed that these textual strategies were considered in the Emotional References Chart principles, by Ungerer (1995). By the referential criteria, we verified that the recategorization of referents helps in a moving construction of a referent as much as it collaborates to the opponent’s disqualification. We also observed the use of personal deixis to pathos’ mobilization, once this referential process promotes the insertion of the interlocutor in an emotional scene. By the intertextual criteria, firstly, it was possible to confirm that, in the pathos’ mobilization, intertextuality keeps a meaningful relationship towards referentiation. We realized that intertext evokes certain referential networks that are determining to the mobilization of pathos, because it either helps in a moving presentation of a certain referent and or we associate it to other referents that are sentimentally marked. Besides, we observed the regularity in the use of quotes and paráfrases to biblical passages that, by expressing punishment ideas, mobilized the feeling of fear; and also the use of broad allusion as a mechanism of the opponent’s disqualification, bearing in mind some historical background mentions that help discredit the opponent thesis.