The Tragedy in Mariana (MG): Aphorizations, Media and Argumentation

Abstract

In situations of disaster or tragedy of major proportions, as it was the case of the disruption of the dam belonging to the mining company Samarco, in Mariana - MG, the voices of the victims – people now dispossessed of all or almost all – are highlighted, dividing media space with the speech of authorities and experts. Articulating this issue with the notion of aphorization proposed by Maingueneau (2012), our goal is to analyze the special section of the newspaper Estado de Minas (12/05/2015 ), entitled: “Mariana voices: pain in the first person” (“Vozes de Mariana: a dor em primeira pessoa”), so as to find out how secondary aphrorizations (i.e. those that are detached from a text in the form of titles, intertitles and/or photo captions) related to the victims are (re)constructed by the newspaper. Articulating French Discourse Analysis with the contributions of Argumentative Semantics (see, for example, DUCROT 1987 , KOCH , 1992), we intend to grasp, in the examined aphorizations, linguistic “marks”, such as vocabulary selection, modalizers, presupposition markers, among others, that allow us to reconstruct the feelings (“the pain”) manifested by these “anonymous voices” about the tragedy. We assume, therefore, the fundamental role that the media play in the construction of public opinion, to the extent that, by highlighting or silencing certain voices, they will (con)form images of the events and of the participating actors.