Construção do argumento e manifestação da atitude em debates eleitorais televisivos de presidenciáveis: um estudo sistêmico-funcional

Abstract

Events and facts in the political sphere result in a plurality of widely disseminated discursive productions, which leaves the population facing a range of discourses that imply the need for critical reading. In this sense, by linking theoretical concepts in linguistics to political discourse and argumentation, this thesis aims to analyze the argumentative architecture of practical reasoning employed in electoral debates of presidential candidates in the Brazilian TV during the electoral periods of 2018 and 2022 and verify how debaters use the attitude subsystem of the main semantic fields (affect, judgment and appreciation) in relation to the term Brasil in order to contribute to the construction of the argument of these discursive events. To achieve this, we rely on the appraisal system (MARTIN; WHITE, 2005), as well as the conception of political discourse by Bochett et al. (2017) and argumentation in the political discourse of Fairclough and Fairclough (2012).The corpus consists of full transcripts of all seven televised electoral debates of presidential candidates from the first electoral round of 2018 and the three televised electoral debates of presidential candidates from the first electoral round of 2022. The methodology was both quantitative and qualitative, structured in the following steps: (1) identification of the words predominantly used by the presidential candidates and selection of the excerpts in which they appear; (2) investigation of the presence of attitudinal evaluations and practical argumentation in the selected excerpts; (3) classification of attitude occurrences performed by the debaters in the selected excerpts; (4) identification of arguments and elements of practical reasoning in the selected excerpts; and (5) cross-referencing the results of the previous steps to identify the argumentative architecture of practical reasoning in presidential debates in Brazilian television media. The results show that the arguments employed by the presidential candidates are of the practical reasoning type, in that plausible paths to be adopted in a future state of affairs were recurrent in the deliberations (FAIRCLOUGH; FAIRCLOUGH, 2012). Furthermore, we found that, among the five premises of practical reasoning proposed by Fairclough and Fairclough (2012), arguments containing attitudinal evaluations for the term Brasil primarily involved claim for action and circumstance, which leaves the premises goal, meansgoal and values in a less prominent place. Finally, the results demonstrated that attitudinal evaluations towards the country the presidential candidates intend to govern contribute to the argumentative construction of the discursive event in question.