Posters of liquid protests

Abstract

This article aims to analyze a corpus formed by sample of posters used in the Brazilian protests, called "Passe Livre”, in 2013. Our study intents understand the posters under the multi-systemic perspective (Castilho, 2010). The posters are a kind of textual genre (Bakhtin, 2011). This work explores the mutual interactions between the language and the social facts, performing quantitative analysis of the posters at various levels (from the lexical to the pragmatic-discursive level). Our methodological pillars are the concepts of habitus and linguistic market (Bourdieu, 2003) and the concept of “liquid modernity” (Bauman, 2001). Our analysis showed that: 1) the most common theme of the posters refer to the act of protest, 2) only 40% of the posters are argumentative or injunctive texts, 3) the posters have, in general, only once sentence, 4) in low frequency, the posters have elements of the non-verbal languages, 5) the posters have, more often, simple phrases period, 6) imperative verbs are rare on those posters, and, finally, 7) most of the posters are for declaring something and do another reflect, but not to demand something. All these features indicate that posters have a relationship with the texts of social networks, to which are connected in real time, and are a linguistic product of the generation that has in your habitus the rules of the "liquid modernity".