Discurso e Identidade em Narrativas de Migrantes

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2008

RESUMO

This research investigates the discourse of migrants in their narratives of life experiences abroad. It is centered in the field of Critical Discourse Analysis and focuses the migrants social relations in the target countries and the consequent identity issues involved. The relevance of this research is justified as a possibility to investigate transnational migrations from a linguistic perspective, and is situated in the broadest context of the social changes of modernity and the consequent displacements of the new worldwide dynamics. The subjects of this work are a specific group of migrants, ten people from a city of the Interior of Goiás, called Jaraguá. This city represents one of the many Brazilian towns which share common characteristics of other localities worldwide, from where people find their ways through the so called global routes. The analyses, in the beginning identify interdiscursive processes in order to detect possible voices that construct the migrants own discourse and its links to the discourses of modernity. Next, the representational meanings of the narratives are prioritized. With the support of the Analysis of Transitivity (Halliday and Mathiessen, 2004) and the proposals on "the representation of the social actors" of van Leeuwen (1996), the analyses identify who the principal actors are in the migrants narratives, what their roles are and their respective power relations on the mechanisms involving migratory fluxes. Finally, the particular styles of the migrants discourse are analyzed through the lenses of Appraisal Theory (Martin and White, 2007) which is applied to the evaluation sections of the narratives to show how migrants evaluate the complex scenarios of their arrival and the relevance of their own migration experiences. The chapter is based on theories of space and spatiality taken from some geographic concepts of space and territory (Haesbaert, 2006).The results of this study throw some light on the linguistic mechanisms involving social issues like the current migratory flows. Its main contribution is the demonstration of the instrumentality of analytic models such as Critical Discourse Analysis and Functional Systemic Linguistics in the revelation of how the articulation between lexical choices, thematic structure, disposition of actors and roles, among other elements, are aligned to construct subalternative identities or their resistance and a social reality which is able to combat as well as facilitate issues of dominance, discrimination and prejudice. In doing so, this work also tests the applicability of these theories on the Portuguese language and contributes to the development of these areas in Brazil.

ASSUNTO(S)

território migrantes discourse transitivity territory valoração narrative migrants discurso modernity transitividade identidade identity narrativa linguistica modernidade appraisal theory

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