O ethos das obras de autoajuda para terceira idade

• Ano de defesa: 2014
• Autor(a) principal: Ueda, Michele Cristina Barquete [UNESP]
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Estadual Paulista (Unesp)
• Palavras-chave em Português: Linguística; Análise linguística (Linguística); Análise do discurso; Ethos; Modalidade (Linguistica); Autoajuda; Idosos - Livros e leitura; Linguistic analysis (Linguistics)
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/11449/122114

This paper aims to analyze the ethos of self-help books targeting the third age, considering grammar and lexical items contained in the text. The considerations with regard to ethos described and followed in this research belong to the French Discourse Analysis, with special emphasis on Dominique Maingueneau’s reflections in this regard. According to him, ethos is about the image projected by the subject of enunciation considering the way they enunciate. The corpus of the research is composed of three self-help books for the third age that were originally written in Portuguese. The ethos can be captured through many evidences contained in the text. Thus, in this study we chose to analyze the ethos mainly through modal elements found in the corpus. The analysis of modality was chosen as this category is related to enunciator’s subjectivity expression regarding their enunciate. Therefore, modal elements are a privileged focus of linguistic-discursive investigation in order to analyze the ethos. The study of modality was carried out mainly based on Hengeveld’s functional considerations (2004) about the theme. The choice of functional component to analyze data is justified because this line of research provides relevant information on the subject and considers, in its analyses, the discursive context with modal elements. The analysis of ethos also takes into account other aspects of the surface of self- help discourse for the third age, like the occurrences of verbs in the imperative and the employment that the lexical item “old” reveals about the authoritative tone that dominates this discourse. The analysis also shows that the self-help discourse for the elderly is less an optimistic speech that offers seniors formulas to achieve a happy old age and more authoritarian discourse that is designed to teach the society to help and understand the elder