Paper 024: Becoming a President: A Diachronic Study on the Language of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro
MATTE, Marine (UNIVATES, BR); GOULART, Larissa (NAU, US); SARMENTO, Simone (UFRGS, BR); REBECCHI, Rozane (UFRGS, BR)
Keywords: Discourse analysis, political speech, diachronic variation.
Abstract
Since the election of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil, several newspapers have written about the president’s discourse and his use of language (cf. Beirão, 2019; Lago, 2018). Some claim Bolsonaro speaks the “language of the people” or “the language of social media”, among other coinages. Nevertheless, none of these reports have attempted to conduct a systematic analysis of Bolsonaro’s speech. Following corpus-assisted discourse analysis studies (Baker, 2006), in this presentation, we conduct a diachronic investigation of Bolsonaro’s political speeches during his seven terms in the House of Representatives, which started in 1991. Our goal was to identify the themes that became popular as his political career progressed. The corpus was compiled from the official records of the government and divided into seven subcorpora representing each mandate. Multi-word units (MWU) were extracted using Sketch Engine. Then, key-MWUs were identified for each of the seven mandates using the speeches of other representatives as a reference corpus. Overall, 1,641 MWU composed of 2 to 4 words were identified as key, with 279 of those occurring in all seven subcorpora. These MWUs were then classified according to semantic categories that emerged from the data, such as legal matters, armed forces, money and natives’ rights. Preliminary results show that over time references to money and communism have declined, while references to education, punishment, and to electoral matters have steadily increased. The results of this quantitative and qualitative study can help us better understand the construction of the far-right discourse in Brazilian Portuguese as Bolsonaro is a representation of right-wing politics, and encourage future comparisons across languages.
Presentation video
Supplementary Information
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Q&A live (Zoom) session
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This looks to be a very interesting paper. I hope you enjoy the conference! – Organizing committee
Thank you for an interesting talk. I also conducted a similar study focusing on Japan’s PM messages. One comment. What do you think about the need to collaborate with the researchers in other fields such as domestic politics?