A construção da referência e a política de nomeação no Boletim de Ocorrência (BO)

Abstract

This thesis had as main objective to problematize and analyze the reference procedures used by the police officer in the Police Report {Boletim de Ocorrência - BO), regarding to those involved and the fact happened, attempting to identify the representation policies within which this appointment and reference policy occurs. More specifically, we seek to analyze: a) how the representation policy is based on the choices of the reference and naming processes, used in the BO; b) what types of reference, according to the proposal of Donnellan (1966), used by the police officer in the preparation of BO; and c) what is the role of the descriptive expressions facing the patterns of nominal and pronominal reference in constructing the reference and naming in that document. These objectives originated from the hypothesis that the reference and naming processes used to describe the occurrence and those involved can be mobilized in order to produce certain meaningful effects that allow the identification of those involved and the characterization of the occurrences in the context of certain representation policies that serve certain interests. Although the police officer is instructed from the Writing Manual to produce a text with impersonality, objectivity and clarity, there are subjective implications that can affect the construction of reference and naming and, consequently, engender different meaning effects. As a result, the police officer lives in a contradictory tension, provided by the constraints related to the BO addressing and the need to attribute the occurrence as a crime in such a way that its handling with the language is fragile, having as effect a relation with the hyperbolic written language. The corpus of the research consisted of 25 (twenty five) BO of 5 (five) distinct natures, namely: 1) Driving drunkenness; 2) Aggression against women; 3) Homicide; 4) Theft; and 5) Drug trafficking. In order to perform this research, we chose as theoretical scope the perspective of Pragmatics, based on Austin's (1990) studies, more specifically regarding the theory of speech acts and the performative character of language. We also rely on the contributions of Rajagopalan (1989, 1996, 2003) and Ottoni (2002). We also mobilize the concepts of attributive use and referential use of defined descriptions proposed by Donnellan (1966). The analysis developed was configured as an analytical-descriptive and qualitative research with an interpretative basis, since it aimed to describe and interpret the data. Among other results, we highlight that, although the Police Writing Manual proposes procedural ways and discursive linguistic strategies that avoid biasing the text produced by the police officer rapporteur, this is impossible because the processes of reference construction and the naming policy always occur within the scope of a representation policy shaped by ideological, social and political issues. In addition, it is possible to affirm that the linguistic choices reveal the positioning and the evaluation of who produces the text, evidencing that there is no linguistic neutrality. Regardless of the effort the police officer make to be as reliable as possible in the choice of words, these words will never fail to carry the bias of the view of who is reporting the occurrence. We can thus say that the hypothesis was confirmed and the objectives reached