Parliamentary discourse favoring the reduction of the minimum age of criminal responsibility: A persuasive or manipulative occurrence?

Abstract

The present analysis comprises a set of texts which were appreciated by the Brazilian House of Commons between 2012 and 2014. Twenty discourses favorable to the reduction of penal full age and eight against were appreciated during this period. This corpus of texts reveals aspects of the structure of this discursive event which, among other factors, embodies linguistic-discursive production and identity processes of a section on the identity of a section of Brazilian population, or rather, law-breaking adolescents. They have been tagged by the press and the media in general in general as promoters of urban violence who go about unpunished. The social and discursive perspective which foregrounds the present investigation, suggested by Norman Fairclough, will be enriched by the contributions to Critical Discourse Analysis proposed by van Dijk, mainly through the reproduction of power through discursive practices. Public speech is above all a tool which provides the enunciator with a regulating power on class relationships characterized by social authoritarianism. The regulatory power of public discourse assents to the desirable confirmation and reproduction of public authority. From the perspective of the political market, these practices are productive to the interest and expectations of those that emulate the role of government status within the current Brazilian political situation.