Enunciation and referencing. The speeches celebrating April

Abstract

The celebration of the revolution of 25th of April 1974, at the Assembly of the Portuguese Republic, is a discursive event that has as its central moment the presidential speech. I will analyze the construction of the discursive reference in this genre of discourse, within the enunciative-pragmatic approach of discourse analysis. The centrality of enunciation in the construction of discourse meaning is widely recognized.As Charaudeau points out, the enunciation encompasses the whole of the act of discourse performed. Thus, this includes the process of constructing the meanings of discourse, and in particular the question of the representation of the world, an issue already mentioned by Benveniste (1970). Reference is overdetermined by enunciation, specifically, by the enunciative positioning of the speaker. The theoretical contributions of Mondada & Dubois (1995) and Mondada (2001) on reference are particularly important. The present work aims at analyzing how the discursive construction of the object of celebration is carried out, in the speeches celebrating the 25th of April. The data is constituted by the presidential speeches celebrating the 25th of April (until the centenary of the Republic), covering the speeches of the four presidents elected after the revolution.