The different points of view evoked in texts about the 2018 presidential elections

the polyphony of enunciators in political cartoons

Abstract

In this article, we aim to analyze the different meaning effects evoked by the semantic-argumentative phenomenon of enunciator polyphony in political cartoons published during the year 2018. Our work is aligned with the field of Argumentative Semantics and assumes a descriptive nature, as it describes the functions of the phenomenon of enunciator polyphony in the cartoons that make up our corpus. This study also has a qualitative character, since it evaluates the cataloged data based on studies on argumentation, polyphony, and the cartoon genre conducted by the following theorists: Ducrot (1987; 1988); Author (2021); Romualdo (2000), among others. After our analyses, we found that enunciator polyphony is a common phenomenon in cartoons and can be essentially activated through three main linguistic strategies: a) Negative utterances; b) presupposition triggered by iterative expressions/words indicating change or continuity of state; and c) the use of argumentative operators. The recurrence of enunciator polyphony in our corpus suggests that the cartoon is a complex genre, whose enunciative space is a constant stage for the expression of conflicting, ironic, or assimilative enunciative viewpoints, whether from the cartoonist-speaker or the linguistic characters created by them.