A study of the discursive ethos in conciliation hearings

Abstract

This study investigates the main strategies of ethos construction of the consumer-enunciator subject that emerges in the participants’ discursive production in a Conciliation Hearing in a Brazilian Small Claims Court (Juizado Especial de Relações de Consumo) from a city in Minas Gerais state. For this, we selected two Conciliation Hearings, which were transcribed and analyzed from the perspective of Semiolinguistics Theory of Patrick Charaudeau. Data analysis showed that during the analyzed audiences the ethos of victim by the consumer is built through some discursive strategies which are not random; on the contrary, the strategies used are consistent with the speech project that the consumer has in mind and, above all, the ethos that he desires to perform.