O dialogismo argumentativo em depoimentos judiciais: técnicas de argumentação, entornos discursivos e novos sentidos em audiências criminais

Abstract

This research intends to analyze oral utterances from the genre of criminal trial hearing statements (instruction and judgment session), under the dialogic prism of its argumentative constructions, from discursive environments and techniques used in the speech spaces controlled by the State-judge, in direct dialogues between its main speaker (a judge or a criminal prosecutor) and the people in audiences (here, witnesses and defendants), heard in the probationary phase. In order to do so, enunciator subject(s), identities/ideologies and discursive purposes and meanings are investigated in judicial environments, based on a dialectical study between Mikhail Bakhtin’s Language Philosophy (enunciative dialogism) and the New Rhetoric by Chaïm Perelman (with Liucie Olbretchs-Tyteca), together with elements of Philosophy and Hermeneutics by authors such as Marx, Aristotle, Siches, Amossy, among others, as theoretical support. The main objective is investigating the resignifications and co-constructions of meanings between audience interlocutors amidst interpretative replicas of the logical-formal application of Law, analyzing the role of argumentation in the dialogical process of these voices in criminal testimonies, based on their persuasive purposes with private audiences, in order to understand such mechanisms in the formation of the enunciated product. Five judicial hearings and three interviews form the investigated corpus, carried out in five judicial court units of the district of São Luís do Maranhão: the analyses of the argumentative enunciations are made about excerpts of these oral statements, in their context situations, both in the procedural testimonies and in the focused conversations with magistrates and prosecutors of the evaluated judicial units. The results prove the relationship between the creation of argumentative spaces and the resignification of procedural discourses (dialogicity), under different reasons and variables, presenting a greater balance between the subjects and their purposes as speakers/enunciators.