A condicionalidade e o intertexto como instrumentos de persuasão em horóscopos: uma abordagem sistêmico-funcional

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2007

RESUMO

This paper aims at studying the persuasive language of horoscopes from online versions of the following American newspapers: Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune and San Francisco Chronicle. 2544 horoscopes have been selected during 53 days, and 943 conditional structures have been found. Latour and Woolgar (1979) state that the objective of rhethoric persuasion is to convince the participants that they havent been convinced, and Halliday (1985) points out that persuasion tends to be highly implicit and to avoid attitudinal language, which is usually associated with interpersonal meaning. The horoscope is a text genre, thus, according to Martin (1984), it can be separated in stages, each of those with its specific function. 37,06% of the analized horoscopes present some kind of conditional structure, with the explicit connector, if (30,75%), or implicit ones (69,25%). Protasis occurs, mostly (71,15%), preposed to the apodosis, functioning as sentence Themes, and, therefore, restricting the content of the Rhemes. The language of horoscopes also presents elements of metadiscursive modality, such as person markers, hedges and emphatics. Besides, one of the stages consists of a kind of truth, a belief that has its roots in polular culture and that helps the reader rescue a specific intertext that the hosroscope writer previously had in mind. In addition, there is the theory of frames (Bednarek, 2005), responsible for text coherence which is attributed, in this case, by the text readers -, that focuses on the relation among text, context, world knowledge, and coherence. Thus, by reading a horoscope, the reader interacts with the text, giving it the most coherent meaning according to their own world knowledge. These factors prepare the readers for the reading and, therefore, they do not question what has been predicted by the author and, at the same time, they act impelled by the power of this genre. The same factors also prevent the horoscope writers from making mistakes regarding their predictions. All that makes horoscopes a highly pesuasive text genre.This kind of persuasion is implicit, for it makes use of a combination of specific lexico-grammatical choices and specific contexts. Regarding the lexico-grammar, this paper focuses on structures that convey conditional meanings, emphasizing Géiss (1971) concept of invited inferences and the relation between conditional structures and Theme, and conditional meaning. It also refers to Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1992; Fowler, 1991), concerning the social function of language, and to Hallidays (1985; 1994) functional model, for the connection between language structures and social values. People are interested in horoscopes because they seem to work as a source for advice and entertainment as, according to Spengler (1969), religious faith has been replaced by other beliefs. The metodology adopted is interpretative, based on quantitative data

ASSUNTO(S)

horoscope persuasao (psicologia) conditional structures persuasão intertexto gênero textual intertext linguistica aplicada iterpersonal function analise do discurso persuasion text genre horóscopo condicionalidade horoscopos -- linguagem funcionalismo (linguistica) função interpessoal lingüística sistêmico-funcional systemic-functional linguistics

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