Critical analysis of ecological discourse in english language headlines: political ebulitions and representations of Brazil in Temer's government

Abstract

Based on the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Critical Discourse Analysis, in this article we present a research work on the ecological discourse of/about Brazil and its representations in headlines of news agencies, newspapers and magazines published in the United States during the government of Michel Temer (2016 to 2018). The scope of this research focuses on ecological issues and, therefore, concerning the environment, the Amazon, climate change, nature preservation, among other related issues. However, in the period between 2016 and 2018, Brazil was also in the international headlines because of other events, such as the political and economic crisis in the country, investigations involving big names in the political and/or business sector, protest marches calling for the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff, among other local events that gained prominence in the global media. The research aimed to identify and analyze the lexical elements, syntactic constructions and semantic aspects that revealed discursive practices of the different social actors represented in the headlines. As a result, we were able to conclude that the discursive and social practices from the subjects who represented Brazil under Temer did not contribute to the country's improvement and accumulated negative discourses on the country's representations in the environmental and/or ecological field, as inscribed in the analyzed headlines.