The Context of Scientific Popularization Utterances About the Environment in Brazil

Abstract

The objective is to investigate how the political and ideological context of the years 2021-2022 in Brazil guided the compositional construction, the thematic content and the style of scientific popularization utterances about the environment through social evaluations and the evaluative emphases of journalistic authors and from quoted speeches by scientists. The social attention given to the theme of the environment and the relevance of the concept of context for an adequate approach to the utterance justify the proposal. To this end, a corpus of utterances from the Pesquisa FAPESP magazine published between January 2021 and December 2022 was gathered, totaling 24 editions. The methodological analysis procedures were: characterize the spheres of production, circulation and reading of the statements; identify the most recurring themes; point out how the political and ideological context guided the verbal part of the statements in the corpus; analyze style in relation to the description of grammatical forms. The main theoretical basis is M. Bakhtin’s, P. Medvedev’s and V. Voloshinov’s work regarding the relationships between the verbal and extraverbal parts of the utterance. The theories of D. Maingueneau, F. Rastier and T. van Dijk highlighted the relevance of the discussion on the concept of context. Main findings: predominance of the “prepared direct speech model” modification; connection between the verbal and extra-verbal parts of the utterances analyzed through social evaluations and the authors’ evaluative emphases; evaluative emphases of threat and risk to Brazilian biomes and the health of the population.