O Estadão e a Presidente: o editorial como estratégia de avaliação

Abstract

In our daily lives, we generally assess, positively or negatively, the objects, the events and the individuals and their behavior. There are, therefore, linguistic resources that we use in such evaluations and which are categorized by an approach originated from Sistemic-Functional Linguistic (HALLIDAY; HASAN 1989; HALLIDAY, 1994; HALLIDAY; MATTHIESSEN, 2004), denominated Appraisal (MARTIN; WHITE, 2005), which was the theoretical base of this study, and, because of that, the concepts are approached here. This system elaborates a taxonomy that aims to assess the collective and individual values shared in a social group. The Assessment, as it was initially known, covers three sub-systems: attitude, engagement, and graduation. Attitude involves the affect, the judgement and the appreciation; the engagement can be monoglossic or heteroglossic; the graduation comprehends the force and the focus. This study works on one of the categories of attitude: the judgment. This category is responsible for assessing people's behavior, taking into account values of social esteem (capacity, tenacity and normality) and of social sanction (property and veracity). In this study, we also approach issues related to the media and discourse genres, with emphasis on the newspaper's genre, especially the editorial, since we aim, with this study, to analyze how the linguistic resources are used in such genres, when it comes to the judgment expression concerning the performance of the President of Brazil, Dilma Roussef. These editorials have been published in a renowned Brazilian news portal, O Estado de S. Paulo, between April and July 2012, being their corpus constituted of thirteen texts. The research being developed here is quali-quantitative and the analises have textual and semantic-interpretative nature. The results show the predominance of negative evaluations in relation to Presidente Dilma Roussef's performance, with social esteem evaluations prevailing, mainly of capacity. The evaluations are, mostly, explicit and suggest the interpretation that the President is not ready to administrate Brazil