Verbal Style as the Dialogic and Pluridiscursive Place of Social Relations: A Dialogic Status for Linguistic Analysis

Abstract

In the present study, we advocate a dialogic status to the activity of linguistic analysis in the reading of texts. The short story The Hidden Cause, by Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, is taken as our corpus, as literature aesthetically consists of a tensioned representation of the linguistic phenomena analyzed herein. The current analysis acknowledges verbal style as the dialogic and pluridiscursive place of social relations in which the lexical and syntactic choices made by the author are oriented towards semantic and object-related connections of cognitive and ethical nature, thus revealing shared social axiologies that support what constitutes text/discourse. The discussion is based on studies carried out by the Bakhtin Circle and on research studies further developed under the same scope. Results reveal the presence of stylistically-compositionally discursive movements that indicate the interaction established among author-creator, interlocutor and theme, which we present herein as dialogic/valuational and whose description requires an axiological interpretation of form as well as a stylistic-grammatical interpretation of language functioning. Hence is the dialogic status of the linguistic analysis carried out.