Forms of persuasion and dialogism

the defendant’s discursive construction in a Jury Court

Abstract

This article is part of the final paper I presented to complete a bachelor’s degree program in Law. The theme was approached from the perspective of ‘evidence’ in Aristotle’s Rhetoric (2013) and the Bakhtin Circle’s studies, mainly Bakhtin’s (2011; 2015; 2018) and Volochínov’s (2013). This study aims to investigate the discursive construction of the defendant’s image in the defense discourse in a jury trial. Methodologically, this research is interpretative-qualitative and dialogues with the sociological method developed by the Bakhtin Circle. The corpus is a criminal defense that occurred in the Jury Court of Alagoinha, PB, in 2017. As a result, we verified that the defendant’s image was created by a discourse grounded on fundamental constitutional guarantees that confers on the defendant the so-called human dignity.