The rhetoric ethos of the argentine political figure amid economic struggles with the farming industry

Abstract

This paper aims to conduct a comparative and contrastive analysis of the configuration of the rhetoric ethos (Maingueneau, 2002) staged by two epitomes of the political scenario in Argentina: former President Raúl Alfonsín and incumbent President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, locked in a turmoil and in a long-standing struggle with the farming sector, one of the cornerstones of the local economy and the major dollar-earner in Argentina. One of the enunciative scenes (Maingueneau, 2007) studied involves an opening ceremony held in August 1988 on the premises of the Argentine Rural Society in the aftermath of the implementation of the “Spring Scheme”, while the other scene takes place twenty years later, in June 2008, when current President Kirchner outlined the reasons which prompted a rise in the so-called export tariffs imposed on certain farm goods. This study seeks to determine the rhetoric and enunciative regularities governing both speeches and establish the similarities and differences in the multi-addressing speech act that each enunciator performs within the framework of their pre-existing discursive ethos (Adam, 1999; Amossy ed., 1999, 2000) in an effort to legitimise their voice. This multi-addressing pattern comprises a discursive strategy to tighten a bond of faith, persuade and argue (Verón, 1987) amid an economic crisis and a political upheaval. Framed within the Theory of Enunciative Polyphony (Ducrot, 1984), this analysis has examined the symbolic role of the antagonist, which in turn will emerge as three different addressees: explicit, veiled and indirect (García Negroni, 1988). The role of the identification collective entities — within the collective imagination — has also been studied as they participate as co-enunciators and also bear the responsibility for the threatening, warning and discrediting acts of speech amid the enunciative, polyphonic contend put on stage by each enunciator to persuade the larger collective entities comprising the Arge ntine society.