O interrogatório policial à luz de fenômenos discursivos intrínsecos à argumentação

Abstract

This study, supported by the conception of ethos proposed by Amossy (2005) and by the classical types of arguments presented by Fiorin (2015), proposes to analyze speech fragments belonging to the police interrogation discursive genre in order to investigate (1) if the prior (AMOSSY, 2005) or pre-discursive (MAINGUENEAU, 2008) ethos of police interrogation participants is confirmed in the discursive ethos of the enunciators; and (2) the types of arguments (FIORIN, 2015) utilized by the enunciators of the police interrogation. The corpus of this study is composed of audio and video recordings of three police interrogations from a Civilian Police station in Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil. Regarding the first purpose of this study, considering the police officers, their prior ethos is discursively confirmed in all analyzed speech fragments. In relation to the interrogated individuals, their prior image is reworked throughout the discourse. Concerning the second purpose of this study, a series of types of arguments are utilized by the enunciators in the police interrogations, namely: comparison argument, argumentum ad hominem, argumentum ad verecundiam, argumentum ad misericordiam e argumentum ad baculum. Finally, the analysis shows that the types of arguments utilized by the police officers and by the interrogated individuals in the interactions function as a resource for the construction of the ethos of the enunciators.

KEYWORDS: Argumentation; Ethos; Types of Arguments; Police Interrogation.