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| Author(s): |
Karla Cristina dos Santos
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | Campinas, SP. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem |
| Defense date: | 2012-08-07 |
| Examining board members: |
Kanavillil Rajagopalan;
Terezinha de Jesus Machado Maher;
Lucia Maria de Assunção Barbosa;
Maria Viviane do Amaral Veras;
Joana Plaza Pinto
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| Advisor: | Kanavillil Rajagopalan |
| Abstract | |
When it comes to combat biased or discriminatory language, Brazilian law establishes two types of behaviors that are considered crimes: the aggravated verbal injury and the crime of prejudice or discrimination. The aggravated verbal injury is a type of insult that makes use of words or phrases pertaining to race, color, ethnicity, religion, origin or to the condition of the elderly or disabled person. The crime of prejudice or discrimination consists in practicing, inducing or inciting discrimination or prejudice based on race, color, ethnicity, religion or national origin. In this case, "practicing" includes not only physical or material acts (such as denying a job, for example), but also means any conduct capable of expressing prejudice or discrimination, including, for example, gestures, signs, expressions, and spoken and written words. Although the two crimes may be performed by linguistic means they have a very different legal definition within Brazilian law: the crime of prejudice or discrimination is an offense directed against a racial, ethnic or religious group (collective), and the aggravated verbal injury is an offense aimed at a particular person (individual). Yet this difference is very controversial. In this thesis, I compare how the Brazilian judicial system and social movements interpret the relationship between insulting and discriminating, which underlines the distinction between the aggravated verbal injury and the crime of prejudice or discrimination. This comparison is based on a survey of data on legal cases of aggravated verbal injury and on interviews with two Brazilian black movements' activists. Following the Austinian approach to speech acts, I reflect on two basic problems of the performative. The first is the intricate relationship between saying and doing and the second is the conflict between conventions and individual acts, viz., between the act of insulting someone individually and the history of discrimination and prejudice that some insults can invoke, spreading the offensive effects beyond the individual. In general, the activists interviewed support that all verbal injury related to race, color, religion, etc. must be considered crimes of discrimination. However, the judicial decisions seldom accept this argument, because they understand that verbal injury, even when related to race, for example, is a saying addressed to a singular person and not to the race as a whole. Analyzing some of the linguistic criteria used by the judicial system, such as the reference of the utterance, the situation and the effect intended by the speaker, I demonstrate that these criteria allow for a final interpretation (a verdict), but do not resolve all the conflicts of interpretation concerning the decisions about offensive and discriminatory language. Some of these conflicts are related to the problem of the limits of the speech act (where it begins and where it ends) (AU) | |