The enunciative responsibility in Dilma Rousseff's after impeachment speech: focus on verb tenses and the person indexes "I", "we" and "they"

Abstract

We propose to analyze the discourse of former President Dilma Rousseff, taking as corpus her first speech after suffering the impeachment process, which gained notoriety in the Brazilian political scene and repercussion in the media, nationally and internationally. In addition, we analyze the management of voices by the first speaker-enunciator, emphasizing the indexes of persons and verb tenses, to show how enunciative responsibility is processed in the text. Theoretically, we anchor ourselves in Textual Discourse Analysis, according to Adam (2010, 2011, 2019), in dialog with Rabatel (2009, 2016a, 2016b), Guentchéva (1994) and other authors. The corpus of the work comes from the G1 news portal website, which presents Rousseff's speech in full. In the analysis of the discourse and text levels, we show the management of voices in the speech, while in the analysis of the textual microstructure, we show that both verb tenses and person indexes were essential for the expression of points of view placed in agreement ("I" and "we") and those against which the speaker-enunciator positions himself ("they"). The examination of these marks shows the meaning effects of victim versus coup plotters and, consequently, signals who wins and who loses with the removal of Dilma from the presidency of Brazil.