“Criminalização discursiva”: a materialidade linguística de sentenças judiciais brasileiras em evidência

• Autor(a) principal: Lenhardt, Jordana
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Outros Autores: [e-mail]
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UERJ
• Texto Completo: http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/handle/1/16908
• topic: Discursive criminalization; Online social networks; Court sentences; Critical analysis of legal discourse; Criminalização discursiva; Redes sociais online; Sentenças judiciais; Análise crítica do discurso jurídico; Análise crítica do discurso; Linguística forense; Redes sociais on-line; Sentenças condenatórias; Direito - Linguagem; LINGUISTICA, LETRAS E ARTES::LINGUISTICA::TEORIA E ANALISE LINGUISTICA

The national media has shown that the use of online social networks has led to implications for Brazilian institutions linked to the legal system. With this in mind, the present thesis attempts to map the linguistic resources of three Brazilian court sentences, issued between 2016 and 2019, which resort to the language used on digital platforms as clues/evidence. To this end, the present textually-mediated social scenario is taken into consideration, as well as problems involving possible restrictions on freedom of speech within the same networks. This research therefore lies within the field of Forensic Linguistics. Thus, it is multidisciplinary in nature and involves studies derived from both Systemic-Functional Linguistics as well as the Law, and is situated within the realm of Critical Discourse Analysis, more specifically, the area of Critical Analysis of Legal Discourse. The study investigates how magistrates´ decisions are structured, taking as a basis certain clues/evidence derived from publications on the sites of social networks. In order to achieve this end, the thesis has created a concept of discursive criminalization. In addition, this thesis focuses on concepts and features which are intrinsic to the following: the language used within the social networks of the Internet; the context of either legal documents or language crimes; and of the court´s sentencing as a textual genre. The theoretical-methodological tools used in the thesis stem from the ideational metafunction in Halliday´s (1994) and Halliday and Mathiessen`s (2004) work on Systemic-Functional Linguistics, and from the interpersonal metafunction as described in Martin and White´s (2005) work. Both provide an informed scaffold for a Critical Analysis of Legal Discourse. The study of the various textual procedures adopted by the magistrates in their documents reveals that their argumentation has not included expert witnesses. Furthermore, on the surface, these texts may be seen as being unbiased and displaying dialogical expansion. In reality, however, they are biased by carefully selecting citations from both other legal texts and legal documents, which support the magistrates’ verdicts. It may thus be concluded, that the analyzed verdicts have not been justified by either material or authorial evidence from the case files. Those verdicts, which are part of the corpus, evaluate the people involved in terms of Judgement, or by means of textually interwoven grammatical and personal metaphors, as well as by either highlighting or ignoring their roles. Two of the sentences analyzed are guilty verdicts and are founded on the absence of power relations and ideologies which involve the language in use in online social networks. This is achieved in order to criminalize discourse. In this thesis it is argued that the text within these documents is disconnected from social reality and resorts to the sentence as a pedagogical instrument on which to base the final decision. The third sentence of a not-guilty verdict displays the social tensions which are originally part of the relationship between the accused and the accuser. It also underlines that court lawsuits, similar to those analyzed here, may in fact be intertwined with hegemonic interests, or may also serve the purpose of silencing the social actors who challenge these hegemonic interests.