Discourse universe of the texts of the “Realengo massacre”: broadening the notion of sociolinguistic profile in forensic settings

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine texts found by police during the investigation of what came to known as the “Realengo Massacre” (which took place in Rio de Janeiro, in 2011), focusing on semantic recurrence as the “creator” of group membership of the enunciator. Here we shall call “discourse universe” the kind of social group we refer to. We intend to discuss the idea of social groups in the realm of sociolinguistics and its implications to sociolinguistic profiling in forensic contexts. We suggest the extension of such notion by examining the discourse level as proposed by greimassian semiotics, mainly where there are short texts involved, since in those cases it is difficult to study linguistic variables following the traditional sociolinguist studies. The question the emerges is: how to select or “deselect” suspects when the texts to be analyzed are generally short and do not show enough data so that social categories can be established in a reliable way? The hypothesis is that semantic recurrence indexes a social group that is not necessarily demographic, but a sort of “discourse community” or “discourse network” that share the same practices, values and ideologies and that are revealed through the texts.