EDITORIAL

Argumentation is a theme which has, for a long time and under different perspectives, been widely discussed and spread through various knowledge strands, producing several study materials. If for Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet, arguments are almost always more truthful than facts themselves, the contemporary studies presented in this issue of Bakhtiniana will help our readers understand this statement as well as others due to their being theoretically founded, rediscovered, mobilized, and contrasted with important thoughts on this productive and yet complex dimension of human language.

The nine articles published in this issue, which correspond to 30% of all the articles submitted and peer reviewed, attempt to demonstrate how discourse theories, which include the different Discourse Analyses (DA), deal with argumentation and, in order to do that, how they are aligned to enunciative trends and their basic analysis categories, and how they revisit and evoke classical approaches to it, such as Perelman's, the ancient and the new Rhetoric, the social, historical, cultural theoretical approaches, or even Ducrot and Anscombre's, just to cite a few. It is evident that the general theory of language, proposed in the totality of the Circle's works, is present in various studies found in this issue whether by being their sole theoretical framework or by establishing a dialogue between theories.

This theoretical mobilization aims not only to prove how discourse studies give new life to argumentation analysis approaches but also, and especially, to enable the understanding, from these new trends, of contemporary aspects of language. As to the chosen objects of analysis, there are those which are more traditionally related to Rhetoric (and to argumentation), such as legal discourse - the battle between the concept of justice and of argumentation and the arguments used by Brazilian Justices in a decision which affected the Brazilian legal understanding of the Maria da Penha Act; political communication; advertising and literature, as well as 'hard rock,' the heavy metal genre and the iconography found in their products, and also the contexts for critical and cooperative teacher education.

The categories and the concepts mobilized for the analysis and the understanding of how argumentation is discursively used in the chosen study objects also vary. Among them, it is possible to highlight the notions of audience, Rhetoric figures, dialogic relations, the grotesque, carnivalization, irony and argumentation strategies, authoritative and internally persuasive discourse, scenography, utterance, text, discourse, argumentative sequence, enthymeme, persuasiveness, life narrative, persuasive meaning effects, among others.

Out of the four reviews presented in this issue, two of them are directly related to argumentation: Vocabulário crítico de argumentação (Critical Vocabulary of Argumentation) by Rui Alexandre Grácio and Figuras de retórica (Rhetoric Figures) by José Luiz Fiorin. The other two comment on works which deal with concepts also present in this issue: Língua, texto, sujeito e (inter) discurso (Language, Text, Subject and (Inter) Discourse), edited by Anna Flora Brunelli, Fernanda Mussalim, and Maria da Conceição Fonseca-Silva, and Saussure: a invenção da Linguística (Saussure: the invention of Linguistics), edited by José Luiz Fiorin, Valdir do Nascimento Flores and Leci Borges Barbisan.

In order to address this issue's theme, Bakhtiniana v.9 n.1 presents a set of works which represent 12 Brazilian higher education institutions from seven different states of Brazil: UEL, UFBA, UFMT, UFMG, UEG, UPF, UFSCar, USP, PUC-SP, UNICSUL, FATEC, and UNIP-SP. Moreover, Bakhtiniana thanks MCTI/CNPq/MEC/CAPES (Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation/ Brazilian National Research Council/ The Brazilian Ministry of Education/ Brazilian Federal Agency for Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education) for awarding us a grant for the publication of this issue.

Beth Brait/PUC-SP/CNPq

Maria Helena Cruz Pistori/PUC-SP/CNPq

Translated by Orison Marden Bandeira de Melo Jr. - [e-mail]

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  10 July 2014
• Date of issue
  July 2014