Enunciative responsibility and point of view:

analysis of a statement by Jair Bolsonaro about the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil

Abstract

This article aims to investigate how enunciative responsibility and Jair Bolsonaro's (L1/E1) point of view are processed in a statement on the COVID-19 pandemic, made on March 24, 2020. Situated in the field of Textual Linguistics, this study is anchored in the theoretical-methodological approach of Textual Analysis of Discourses (TAD), developed by Adam (2008), and in the thoughts of Rabatel (2016), regarding the problematic of point of view (POV) and enunciative responsibility (ER), taken as analytical categories. From the analyses, it was possible to point out a predominance of asserted POV and narrated POV, indicating that the main speaker-enunciator sometimes explicitly manifests his position, opinion, and thesis, assuming the SR by the propositions-enunciated, and sometimes discusses the POV imputed to the second enunciators. In this sense, by making explicit his opinions and value judgments, L1/E1 wants to build before his interlocutor the image of a political leader concerned with physical health, but also with the economy and the income of Brazilian families, an attitude different from that imputed to the second enunciators (governors, mayors and media). Therefore, the management of the different POV builds a more global interpretant effect, with the explicitness of L1/E1's positioning revealing the targeted action.