God, Nation and Family in the impeachment votes of Brazil’s former President Dilma Rousseff: a corpus-based approach to discourse

Rebechi, Rozane Rodrigues 2019. God, Nation and Family in the impeachment votes of Brazil’s former President Dilma Rousseff: a corpus-based approach to discourse. Journal of Corpora and Discourse Studies 2 , pp. 144-174. 10.18573/jcads.34

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Abstract

Brazil’s lower house of Congress voted the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff on 17 April 2016. In addition to choosing for or against sending the case to the Senate, or simply abstaining from voting, most of the 511, out of the 513 Deputies, decided to use their time at the microphone to justify their choices. The session was not even over when Internet users and online newspapers started commenting on the vocabulary that the legislators used, in most cases associating words related to God, family and nation to the pro-impeachment speeches. The transcripts of those talks were available a few days later. Combining corpus linguistics with discourse studies, this paper aims to show the results of the investigation of the keywords used by the representatives of the two largest modes of vote – yes and no –, in order to confirm or not the representation of those speeches by the general public and the press. The analysis of the recurring keywords showed that, contrary to widely published reports, the word choices of the largest two groups of voters statistically coincide. However, their context of use sometimes differs, which was shown by the analysis of concordance lines.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HM Sociology J Political Science > JL Political institutions (America except United States) P Language and Literature > P Philology. Linguistics
Publisher:	Cardiff University Press
ISSN:	2515-0251
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	5 August 2019
Date of Acceptance:	28 October 2019
Last Modified:	05 May 2023 07:19
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/140169

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