Language as a new paradigm: discursive representations of social actor in the scope of restorative justice

Abstract

This study has as objective to analyze how certain social actors are represented in a discourse marked by the ideals of a new way to make justice – the restorative justice. It interests us, more specifically, to analyze how this new justice approach discursively represents the community of support of the victim and of the offender. So we selected the utterances which belong to a guideline for the realization of the procedures of restorative justice. These utterances integrate a handbook called “Iniciação em Justiça Restaurativa: subsídios de práticas restaurativas para a transformação de conflitos” (BRANCHER, 2006), which is used in the activities of the Justice for the 21st Century Project, located in the capital of Rio Grande do Sul. Based on Bakhtinian assumptions, we analyzed the linguistic forms embedded in a particular socio-historical context of verbal interaction and marked by specific dialogic relations which reveal certain point of view. Thus, we have first done a socio-historical analysis of the elements of the most immediate and wider context which involves the production of the guideline. From this, we analyzed the way of representation of the social actors based on the linguistic categories developed by van Leeuwen (1997). With this study, we can state that the discursive representation of the social actors largely points to a culture of peace, announcing the emergence of a new reality which surrounds justice, a reality that goes toward the idea of restorative justice as a new paradigm.