Getúlio Vargas’ Testament Letter : genericity and text organization in political discourse

Abstract

This paper presents a linguistic and discursive analysis of Getulio Vargas’ Testament Letter, focusing on aspects of genericity, compositional configurations and the semantics of the text. The theoretical-methodological support resides on traditional gender studies and textual linguistics, closely approaching the textual analysis of discourse. More specifically, the analysis seeks to describe and interpret the double genericity of the text, ingrained in the traditional nature of such document, the text plan, with a more detailed view of the opening stages and the causal explanation for the suicide, as well as semantic dimension aspects related to the discursive representation of the people component, in contrast to the statesman’s figurations and the political opposition.