Commemorative genre: past and present on Cristina Kirchner?s first speech about Malvinas

PAULA SALERNO

Río de Janeiro

Congreso; 6th International Colloquim "Discourse, representations, argumentation. Interdisciplinarity".; 2017

Communalis - Universidad Federal de Río de Janeiro (Brasil) y Université de Montréal (Canadá)

On April 2nd 2008, the fallen and veterans of the Malvinas War in 1982 were honored, as every year, in Argentina. That day, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner delivered her first commemorative speech as Argentinian President, after taking office on December 2007. This speech was contemporary to the first major political problem she had to deal with during her administration: an agriculture lockout, known as the Farm Crisis, led by a powerful economic sector of the country. Based upon the hypothesis that commemorative speech is intimated articulated in relation with the speaker?s political position and needs, our aim is to understand the particular configuration of the past in the selected corpus. We adopt Discourse Analysis as an interpretative practice (Arnoux, 2008), which provides us with an interdisciplinary perspective that considers Linguistic as much as Historical and Sociological tools. The aim of this study is to enquire into the discourse strategies with which Fernández constructs the national past and, while at it, the present. We consider specifically two mechanisms that rule the configuration of the public dimension of that past: 1) the particular relation between past and present in the frame of a speech considered foundational (Aboy Carlés, 2005), and 2) the shaping of a singular model figure that represents celebrated people as a whole group, based on a specific use of the own name (Barthes, 1973). We also try to relate the usage of different past configuration mechanisms with commemorative genre specific features, making a contribution to the theoretical discussion about discursive genres.