PATHEMIC CAPTATION STRATEGIES

THE AGATHA CASE

Abstract

This article seeks to study, in the communicational device, some discursive techniques that allow the adhesion of the other to a certain position through pathemic indices. As an example of these procedures, we start by analyzing texts from the journalistic sphere, published by two different media instances, about the death of an eight-year-old girl during a police action in Rio de Janeiro. The theoretical framework for the proposed analyzes is anchored in the assumptions of Patrick Charaudeau's Semiolinguistic Theory (2007; 2009) with an emphasis on the media communication contract and information staging strategies. In addition, concepts are also employed in the Bakhtinian perspective (2003), which conceives genres as “relatively stable types of utterances” historically marked, since they are directly related to different social situations. As a result, it is argued that it is possible to perceive a specific part of the social space as a discursive strategy to capture the other through the use of pathemic indices.