Guilt and indignation in Folha de S. Paulo readers’ letters: a study about the discursive construction of the tragedy in Santa Maria

Abstract

This article aims to describe and analyze, through a representational and negotiative approach, the discursive construction of the fire that took place in the dance club Kiss, in Santa Maria, in January 2013, based on a corpus composed by readers’ letters published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo in the days that followed the event. In order to do so, we used theoretical presuppositions and analytical categories related to systemic functional linguistics, focusing on the relation between lexicon-grammatical and discursive-semantic classes in terms of the ideational and interpersonal metafunctions. We concluded that these letters are marked by the prevalence of critical and exhortative text models, marked by a high incidence of negative judgments of social esteem and social sanction, focused on the construction of a frame of incapacity, omission and impropriety, responsible for the recurrence of this kind of events. Thus, there are, in this letters, evidences of the updating of a rhetoric-affective sequence of indignation – that supports the conception of several letters – embedded in the critical and exhortative models of textual production.