Modalidade em discursos ambientalistas: jogo de máscaras em gêneros que compõem as audiências públicas

Abstract

Environment and sustainability have been topics of great relevance, especially in Brazil. Both in the political and in the environmental sphere, speeches endeavor to seek solutions to current problems. Public hearings are an important locus where these speeches are delivered. From a theoretical concept that embraces Genre Pedagogy of the Sydney School (ROSE; MARTIN, 2012), the Generic Structure Potential (HASAN, 1989) and the Systemic Functional Grammar (HALLIDAY; MATHIESSEN, 2014), the focus of this study lies in the genre public hearing, and the use of the modality in environmental speeches. The objective of this study is to determine, through investigation and the analysis of the utterances, as well as the modality categories (HALLIDAY; MATTHIESSEN, 2004), the genre and the degree of involvement of politicians and experts with their speeches on public hearings on environment and sustainable development. The corpus consists of 06 public hearings for the years 2012 and 2013, written in shorthand and later translated, which are available for online viewing at the Chamber of Deputies website. The methodological procedures comprise two stages of analysis: contextual and textual, in a quantitative and qualitative way both of the genre and the modality. The results indicate that public hearings on environment and sustainable development can be considered a macro-genre, as it has in its constitution genres that form a sequence to fulfill a social purpose and are outlined in stages that contribute to its operation. Regarding modality, we highlight its increased use in the exchange of goods and services. While politicians little undertake in their speeches by using a low degree of modulation, experts are committed to a high degree of obligation-modulation. The masquerade which then installs, recreates and keeps the elated dynamics that exists between the force of power (politicians) and the power of knowledge (experts).