Teachers’ strike in RS in 2017: polemics and teacher’s representation by means of ad hominem argument

Abstract

According to Aristotelian Rhetoric and to the New Rhetoric studies, by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (2014), the aim of argumentation was related to the spirits adherence: the speaker should pursue a consensus along with the audience. However, in present-day society, this intention makes room for the cultivation of polemics, characterizing what Amossy (2017a; 2017b) classifies as the rhetoric of dissention. In order to present their opinion, some people draw on ad hominem arguments, directly attacking the person of their opponent instead of his/her arguments (FIORIN, 2015). Therefore, this paper analyzes polemics established during the strike made by teachers from Rio Grande do Sul in 2017. We aim at studying how the commentator-readers of Portal G1 RS have constructed their discourses, by means of ad hominem arguments, besides of pointing out possible representations of the strike teachers assumed by those readers. Among the 44 comments we have collected, 15 present ad hominem arguments. From this last group, 3 are analyzed in this paper. The analysis is organized in two sets: (1) analysis of the comments, considering the definition of polemic discourse (AMOSSY, 2017b); (2) categorization of the 15 comments, in order to evidence the representations of the strike teachers assumed by the readers. The results indicate that the personal attack to the teachers can be framed into two perspectives: (1) part of the readers ascribes to the teachers the role of militants, mainly on the left; (2) the other segment considers the teachers’ behavior as inappropriate. In brief, we have noticed that the comments, inside a discourse of dissention, raised a number of accusations in order to delegitimize the claims made by the teachers from the public system.