Análise retórico-conversacional dos atos verbais e não verbais no acordo retórico no gênero debate político televisivo

Abstract

The study of the non-verbal and verbal elements as well as the rhetorical categories in use in televised political debate is the goal of this research. Rhetoric is understood as a technique to discover the appropriate means of persuasion through discourse (Aristóteles, 2011). Non-verbal and verbal acts, in turn, are fundamental for this persuasive doing, since gestural movements, as well as all non-verbal behavior, mostly accentuate, complement or replace discursive elements of verbal language (RICHMOND, MCCROSKEY; HICKSON, 2012). Therefore, by exploring the televised political debate of the presidential elections of the year 2014, this study undertakes a rhetorical and conversational analysis of the communion of verbal and non-verbal elements of these debates and highlights the presence and (re)construction of rhetorical agreement, as a base category, for all rhetorical study, especially those that focus on media and political genres. As a theoretical basis of rhetorical studies, we highlight the conceptions of Aristóteles (2011), Mateus (2018), McKerrow (2012), Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (2014), Platão (2003) among others stand out. In the studies of non-verbal elements, we highlight the concepts present in Oliveira (2021), Rector and Trinta (1999), Santos (2007) and (2004) among others. The televised political debate genre is made up of speech and image, therefore the qualitative research on the text (transcripts of two second round debates) and the image (captures with meaningful gestures) developed here, along the lines of Flick (2009), Leach (2015) and Bauer and Gaskell (2015). Two central points indicate the relevance of this study: the work with multimodal genres and the systematic analysis of rhetorical agreement in convergence with verbal elements and other rhetorical categories, such as arguments and persuasive means. Thus, the work evidenced: the immanence of illustrative gestures to insert persuasive arguments and project the images of debaters (ethos); the scarcity of non-verbal behaviors that contradict verbal discourse; the correlation between non-verbal element and rhetorical categories, that is, when there is significant gesture, almost always, a rhetorical category emerges; the repetition of non-verbal and rhetorical behaviors in an interactional way. Given this, it is evident how much rhetoric acts in language practices, especially in political ones, such as debate. In this practice the persuasion of the viewers (voters) is the target and, with this in mind, the debaters articulate verbal and non-verbal language during their expositions. The rhetorical agreement enters this linguistic action exactly to organize the debaters' thesis, sustaining the starting point and the negotiation of relation (remote and discursive) between politician (debater) and citizen (television audience).