“Troca de Galhardetes”. For the study of verbal violence in polemical discourses concerning the orthographic agreement in Portugal

Abstract

The main goal of this study is to show the use of aggressiveness and verbal violence in polemical discourses, from a corpus composed by opinion texts concerning the Orthographic Agreement of 1990, taking in account the perspective of Discourse Analysis, Pragmatics, Rhetoric, Argumentation and Interactional Linguistics. The study is mainly based on the notions of ethos and Face Threatening Acts, in order to verify which are the dominant linguistic-discursive strategies that convey aggressiveness and verbal violence. The corpus’ analysis allows us to conclude that the speakers manipulate several strategies in the construction of their arguments, always with the intention of provoking and perpetuating the dissensus. Frequently, speakers confront their opponents, disqualifying them and, by extension, their supporters, instead of discussing the difference of opinion.