UMA ANÁLISE DA CULTURA DO CANCELAMENTO SOB A ÓTICA DA POLÍTICA LINGUÍSTICA

Abstract

Among the various study objects of language policies, the linguistic landscape is one of them. With the emergence of social media, the creation and dissemination of media content went from the hands of communication professionals to the hands of lay people. In this scenario, our main object of investigation focuses on cancellation comments posted on Instagram aiming to investigate how the linguistic landscape caused by this type of discourse is outlined, characterizing the linguistic choices made by internet users. Cancel culture is related to a type of virtual lynching made by a group of people, generally directed at famous institutions/personalities who have taken a stance on a controversial issue, being that stance considered wrong by internet users. To achieve our objective, we resort to the notion of linguistic landscape developed by Shohamy (2006) with regard to understanding the language used on the internet as a mechanism of linguistic policy, as well as Spolsky's (2009) vision regarding the use of language in public space as a domain. We characterize this research as qualitative and interpretive in nature, based on Minayo (2016) and Lin (2015), respectively. The corpus of this research corresponds to cancellation comments motivated by three different events that resonated on Instagram, observing the linguistic choices used to do the canceling. Regarding the analysis of the corpus, partial results indicate that the effects of cancel culture on the highlighted observations are carried out, in general, through hate speech materialized by foul expressions and experimental words whose purpose refers to censorship, persecution and an almost restriction of freedom, an interdiction of speech.