Idiomatic expressions in Brazilian Portuguese: a discursive approach

Abstract

The scope of this paper is to analyze idiomatic expressions in the Portuguese language spoken in Brazil and show how argument is linguistically built in such idioms. The analyses depart from different enunciations to make it explicit that when the writer organizes his speech he purposely directs it towards an intended conclusion. The corpus of the analyses is the discourse of speeches delivered by politicians and published on Veja and Isto É magazines. To achieve such a goal, discourse analysis (DA) theories and principles provide the bases for demonstrating how the construction of argument in those enunciations is carried out, as argument is considered a strategy largely used to persuade people to corroborate certain issues.