Powers and dangers of the voice: an analysis of the media speeches about Lula's laryngeal cancer and its sequels

• Grant number: 12/08546-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: September 01, 2012
• End date: August 31, 2013
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics - Linguistic Theory and Analysis
• Principal Investigator: Carlos Félix Piovezani Filho
• Grantee: Giovana Moretti
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims to analyze the speeches made by the Brazilian media about the laryngeal cancer suffered by the ex-President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the threats to his voice represented by the illness. Characterized as a discursive event, the announcement of Lula's disease produced a large and dispersed set of texts about the risks his voice was taking: everyday conversations, posts and tweets on social networks, discussions among doctors, comments made by politicians, news, chronicles and media reports, etc. This set includes a wide range of sayings that go from eventual quite hostile curses going through more or less referential statements until the predominant votes for a speedy recovery. Considering the fact that the media, at the same time, produces utterances which society appropriates and echoes the sayings that were already floating in the latter, we propose to identify some discursive units and regularities in the dispersion of the media texts generated from the mentioned episode. To do so, based on the Analysis of Speech derived from Michel Pêcheux and his group, we intend to analyze utterances extracted from a corpus consisted of texts of many genres which circulated in the Brazilian newspapers Folha de São Paulo and Estado de São Paulo, and in the weekly Brazilian magazine Veja, between October 29th, 2011 - date of disclosure of Lula's cancer diagnosis - and March 29th, 2012 - when the broadcast of a video in which the ex-President announced the cure of his disease in the previous day was echoed. (AU)