O PAPEL DOS HEDGES EM AUDIÊNCIAS TRABALHISTAS NO CONTEXTO PÓS-REFORMA LEGISLATIVA

Abstract

The general objective of this work is to highlight, within a socio-interactional perspective of spoken language, the presence of conversational markers of attenuation in labor court hearings held in various districts of the 24th Regional Labor Court (Mato Grosso do Sul), in order to discuss the role of linguistic resources that operate as strategies of attenuation, politeness, and face preservation in the speech of hearing participants. The theoretical framework of this research is based on the principles of Conversation Analysis in its interface with Forensic Linguistics, Labor Law and Procedure, based especially on the works of Rosa (1992), Marcuschi (1986), Caldas-Coulthard (2014), Coulthard and Johnson (2010), and Coulthard (2014). The research is structured in five sections, in addition to the introduction and the conclusion: section two presents issues relevant to spoken language; section three addresses conversational markers, face, politeness, mitigation markers, and hedging; and section four discusses forensic linguistics and interaction in legal contexts, with a specific focus on labor reform. The fifth section describes the methodology and corpus composition, and section six analyzes and discusses the data. Finally, we present concluding remarks on the research, which consists of a discussion of thirty excerpts taken from ten different audiences. According to the results, we note that interactants in the labor court context, although seemingly rigid and highly formal, employ conversational markers of attenuation, as they help to defuse difficult situations and minimize the problematic burden of certain topics in a verbal interaction. Particularly regarding hedges, the analyses confirmed that participants in labor court hearings use these markers to modify the illocutionary value of a statement. Among these markers, of interest in this work are those that act as attenuators, modifying the assertive force of statements, such as hedges that signal verbal planning activities (thus, that is to say, let’s say, let’s say) and those that express uncertainty (Rosa, 1992, p. 48), which generally occupy a parenthetical position in statements.