Illocutionary acts in juridical discourses in Portuguese

Abstract

Can we theoretically describe the structure and dynamism of discourse? Wittgenstein and Searle have expressed skepticism. However, the ability to converse is part of agent’s linguistic competence. Moreover, interlocutors come to achieve proper conversational goals corresponding to a possible direction of fit between words and things. They come to describe the world; to deliberate on what to do, to change things by declarations and to express common attitudes. Greetings, consultations, debates, negotiations, jury deliberations and collective protestations are joint illocutions of higher level. Several agents contribute to their performance during an interval of time. Maybe there is no possible rigorous theory of all language-games. But speech act theory can rigorously analyze felicity conditions of dialogues with a conversational goal which are part of any discourse because they are conducted according to a system of constitutive rules. The primary objective of our paper will be to use and apply the resources of Vanderveken’s general discourse pragmatics in order to explicate the structure and dynamics of the main kinds of juridical discourses. We will show that they are juridical discourses with the four conversational goals. Argumentations, testimonies and counter testimonies are descriptive, practical debates and jury deliberations are deliberative and judge condemnations are declaratory. We will analyse in detail the felicity conditions of trials and identify their capital first level illocutions. Deliberations of a jury must terminate with a verdict. Finally, we will semantically analyse according to our explication of forces and discourse types a lot of Brazilian illocutionary or performative verbs that name first or second level illocutions that are constitutive of juridical discourses.