Strategies of Syncretic Enunciation: a Comparative Analysis

Abstract

This paper’s main goal is to examine how the verb-visual elements on the cover of the Brazilian male magazines Men’s Health and G Magazine put different meaning effects into play. Despite being the latter directed to a homosexual public and the former to a heterosexual one, it’s possible to notice a rather similar structure on the cover of these publications. On both there is a picture of a well built athletic man displaying his naked chest and surrounded by headlines. The Hjelmslevian concept of syncretism (Hjelmslev, 2003), developed by Greimas (2008), Floch (apud Fiorin 2009) and Fiorin (2009) was of utmost importance to the elaboration of this analysis, as well as Lucia Teixeira’s methodological approach (2009). The analysis has showed that G Magazine employs a contractual syncretic strategy, once there’s just one isotopy, that of erotism, which underlies both verbal and visual languages. Men’s Health, in turn, grounds itself on a polemic syncretic strategy, once visual and verbal languages start a second isotopy by contrariety, that of health/beauty — which ends up almost banning a potentially inferable visual isotopy, that of erotism. The analysis of both the expression plan and the content plan in articulation led to a tensive perspective which proved a higher concentration of thymic load on the cover of G Magazine, that is, a higher intensity, and a higher extensity on the cover of Men’s Health. Finally, with regard to relations between enunciator and enunciatee, it was observed that Men’s Health presents itself primarily as a modal object, ie, possession of power know-how, whose focus is on competence, whereas G Magazine presents itself as an object of value, which pragmatically sanctions its enunciate. Thus, by the syncretic analysis of these texts, the causes of different meaning effects generated by similar structures were observed.