Pathetic discursive strategies at the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo: emotion as argument in the journalistic practice

Abstract

The pathos, or emotion, is a necessary condition (and not a seeming contradiction) of journalistic discourse and promotes a connection between the communication partners in a contract. The newspaper industry may be used for purposes of drama and playfulness, for example, trying to touch the affections of the receptor, causing him some emotional state that is conducive to a target of influence of the producer of the news. We will talk about ways of referring the pathos, trying to get some clues of the emotion in lexical and syntactic information and in the use of common terms in our shared culture. For this, we will take two corpora published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo: an area of 2008 entitled “Student with paralysis depends on the mother to attend the class” and a critique of the ombudsman to this news.