Ways of Representing Social Actors in the Penal Juridical Context

Abstract

This work aims at presenting social semantics categories adapted to the Portuguese language in order to analyze social actors in the records of a penal lawsuit, running in the 1st Criminal Division of the Santa Maria Court of Justice, state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. The analysis of the modes of representation of law operators, witnesses, and defendant in the records focuses on how language is used to judge a crime against life in Brazil. The analysis indicates that when we have consciousness over the use of lexical grammatical recourses in the process of representation we can identify which social actors and activities are excluded (caused by suppression or coverage) or included (in different ways) in the discourse and which meanings these procedures can generate in the juridical context.