Discurso direto fictivo como potencial desencadeador da mescla da carapuça: uma estratégia argumentativa usada em mensagens religiosas

Abstract

This study falls within the field of Cognitive Linguistics and its general objective is to investigate how religious leaders use Fictive Direct Speech in their messages to enhance persuasion and emotional connection with their listeners. Fictive Interaction consists of using the Conversation Frame to structure thought, grammar and speech (Pascual, 2014). In the specific case of Fictive Direct Speech (Rocha, 2022), the canonical mold of reported speech is not necessarily used to report uttered speeches, but mainly to convey “thoughts out loud”, as an internal debate. The postulates of the Theory of Mental Spaces (Fauconnier, 1994) and the Theory of Conceptual Blending (Fauconnier, 1997) are of great importance in the analysis, as they contribute to describe the cognitive framework underlying the object of study. The concepts of Footing (Goffman, [1979]/2013) and Argumentation (Schiffrin, 1987), commonly used in speech-in-interaction analyses, are also used. The research is qualitative (Denzin; Lincoln, 2000), and the corpus consists of videos of messages from the catholic priest Fábio de Melo, the evangelical pastor Silas Malafaia and the spiritist lecturer Divaldo Franco, published on the Youtube platform. The results of this work show that the cases of Fictive Direct Speech produced by these religious introduce comprehensive, generic and abstract mental spaces, in which fictive (non-genuine) interlocutors dialogue on broad and varied themes. Elements of Fictive Direct Speech generically instantiated by the speaker, such as the imprecise deixis, and components that integrate latent subjective (argumentative) positions on the part of the listeners, can be projected onto each other and culminate in what we call Mescla da Carapuça (Cap Blending), a cognitive operation of particularization of general instances (GENERIC X IS PARTICULAR X). The fact that elements of Fictive Direct Speech are presented with generic instantiation helps the listener to fill in the gaps with referents from his personal repertoire. In this way, he may have the feeling that his position, restricted to his thinking, and contrary to that of the speaker, is somehow accessed by the religious leader and revealed through fictive interlocutors, as if the religious message were specifically addressed to that listener. Ultimately, it reveals how the Fictive Interaction in direct speech socio-cognitively manages the potentially intervening purpose on the subjectivities of the listeners.