Representações metafóricas da corrupção endêmica em corpus digital: o caso do jeitinho brasileiro

Abstract

This thesis investigated a cognitive phenomenon: the perception of endemic corruption by Brazilians and one of its manifestations in our culture, the “jeitinho”. The theoretical and methodological orientation was based on Cognitive Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics. Two exploratory corpora were analyzed: the first, with data from the Now section, a component of the Contemporary Portuguese Corpus, available online, and the second, a Corpus of Similes, which was compiled by using the Google search engine. The thesis initially explored the frames of these two corpora, and then searched for them in the Study Corpus, which consisted of comments collected on the YouTube social network, between 2014 and 2021, in contemporary Brazilian Portuguese in use. The hypothesis of the thesis was that metaphorical patterns would be found and, therefore, could characterize the jeitinho phenomenon in the Study Corpus (Semino, Demjén and Demmen, 2018). Consistent patterns of repetition were identified among “topics” (the non-metaphorical portions) and their vehicles (the metaphorical parts), which suggested the presence of “systematic metaphors” that emerged from discontinued texts, one of the characteristics of comments made in social networks. Thus, although the traditional definition of systematic metaphor focuses on the articulation between two distinct ideas in the same discursive event (Cameron, 2003), the topics of Corpus comments functioned as an integrating element of cohesion, which served as a framework for the identification of systematic metaphors, which, in this thesis, were also defined as reiterated metaphors of a cultural nature. We proposed that the function of these systematic metaphors in the analyzed comments was to create position alignments among the interlocutors, who did not know one another and were not at the same discursive event. The analysis found the presence of three repeated frames: Dissemination, Root and Presence, with repeated lexical patterns, as in (endemic) corruption that spreads out like a plague or a virus. Eight systematic metaphors were recruited from the frames, of which the most reiterated was BRAZILIAN JEITINHO IS AN INHERITED OBJECT. The one that appeared in a smaller number was BRAZILIAN JEITINHO IS FLEXIBILITY