Aspectualization of the actor in journalistic discourse

Abstract

This article intends, firstly, to approach the usage of the concept of aspectualization of the actor, used by French semiotics (or Greimasian), in the argumentative direction of a journalistic text. Thus, this paper aims at analyzing the types of presence of the speech enunciator through the projections of the judgments made to the actions of the actors of the speech. The conceptions and theoretical foundations used are based on the categories of excess x lack x fair measure, established by Fiorin (1989), through the contributions on aspectualization already performed by Greimas and Courtés (2008), as well as in researches done by Discini (2006) and by Gomes (2012a; 2012b, 2014). This article also aims at demonstrating the interrelation between modalization and aspectualization, and their argumentative effects in the text. However, the analysis of the concept of aspectualization of the actor is not restricted to the discursivization of the modal stages of the narrative structures. On the contrary, the aspectualization of the actor in the statement reaches, in this article, a wider and more discoursive perspective when it is also ascertained through the influence of the passions and tense categories, proposed by Zilberberg (2006). Thus, in analyzing two pieces of news regarding the request for impeachment of Dilma Rousseff made by the former president of the House of Representatives, Eduardo Cunha, published in different online newspapers, this paper aims at examining how the aspectual mechanisms work in the construction of texts and mark their subjectivity.