Emotions and argumentation in the Portuguese Parliament

Abstract

The Parliament is a place of discourses. More than the physical aspect it is important to consider the political symbology of a place where power relations are at stake. The participants in the parliamentary debates, deputies and the government have the symbolic legitimacy that results from the electoral acts which is not enough to play the political game. To impose authority, to discredit the opponent and gain influence are fundamental aspects of the political parliamentary activity performed in debates. The parliamentary debates, in particular, are a way of monitoring the government action. We have selected the debate of the state of the Nation, a sub-genre of the parliamentary debates, which takes place at the end of each parliamentary term. Thus, the parliament takes stock of the government’s action through the confrontation of the political positions present in order to deepen disagreement. Not intending to be an exhaustive approach to the theme, we analysed the debate of the state of the Nation, which took place in the Portuguese Parliament on 3 July 2009, at the end of the 12th legislative term under a socialist government. For functional reasons, we have not taken the multimodal approach into consideration, despite regarding it as important, once our research is based on written texts, official reports of the parliamentary debates, published in the Portuguese parliamentary journal (DAR). We have therefore left aside the systematic consideration of the paraverbal and non verbal, that is, the expression of emotion through the body. In fact, besides the information provided by the punctuation, only some non verbal information - applause, laughter, protests - are registered in the DAR We have focussed however on the linguistic subject proper together with the episodic indications related to the “extra linguistic”. Our objective is to analyze the mechanisms of construction of the emotions in the parliamentary debate considering the hypothesis that a strong strategy of construction of the parliamentary speeches begins by expressing and attributing emotions.