Misunderstandings and Contradictions in Discursive Argumentation: silence emergence production processes in cases of Brazilian digital media

Abstract

In language, there are a few cases of exposition of arguments that, in spite of all the effort the subjects do in their enunciative constructs, misunderstandings and contradictions seem to return in these arguments, which may generate some disagreement. These flaws in argumentation can and must be explained by several theories within the scope of language studies: from the most structural, through the enunciative theories, to the most discursive. In this sense, we propose in this paper to search, in a discursive understanding of language, namely, from French Discourse Analysis, and more specifically that of the discursive theory of constitutive silence to every language process, proposed by Eni Orlandi (2007), the analyzes for these ritual failures in the elaboration of the arguments. To do so, we have brought the analysis of some cases that have occurred in what we call the digital media of Brazilian daily life, that is, cases that circulated in the virtual spaces of the Internet and its various enunciative devices. In these case analysis, we seek, through the formula of constitutive and foundational silence, described by Orlandi (2007), to understand how misunderstandings and contradictions are, in fact, the evidence and irruption of these discursive silencings in the discursive arguments of the cases. Thus, responding to this hypothesis is our main objective in this work.