Enunciative-Argumentative Positioning Through The Sentential Adjunct in Forensic Reports

Abstract

This article aims to analyze and discuss the enunciative and argumentative positioning of the enunciating subject through the sentential adjunct in forensic reports. The study is guided by the theoretical-methodological assumptions of the Semiolinguistics Theory of Discourse (Charaudeau, 1992; 2005; 2008; 2015; Pauliukonis; Gouvêa, 2012), related to approaches to adjuncts of adverbial nature that project their scope over the entire sentence (Ilari, 2007; Moura Neves, 2018; Castilho, 2020; Azeredo, 2021). The corpus consists of 15 forensic reports obtained online. Regarding the data approach, the research is predominantly qualitative in nature, although quantifications are employed. The results demonstrate that the sentential adjunct, traditionally understood as more related to the enunciative and discursive field than to the purely grammatical, presents enunciative and argumentative value in forensic reports, as enunciating subjects aim to attest to the probative reliability of their analyses and conclusions. With this research, we hope to contribute to semiolinguistic studies that move from some grammatical aspect to the discursive level, as postulated by Charaudeau (2005) and Pauliukonis and Gouvêa (2012), also contributing to the understanding of the enunciative behavior of the sentential adjunct in Portuguese.