Clause Complex

Abstract

Several opinion pieces published in the media have positioned themselves for or against the impeachment process of former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff in 2016. The debate of these controversial discourses about the impeachment was realized in language through lexicogrammatical resources to connect reasoning and claim towards a conclusion. One of these linguistic resources is conjunctions, which are used both to connect events and organize a text (Rose, 2020). This paper discusses clause complexing in Brazilian Portuguese and its role in developing argumentative reasoning in a text.  For that, it analyzes an opinion piece entitled Por que sou a favor do impeachment [Why I am for the impeachment], written by Brazilian sociologist Carlos Eduardo Sell (2016), published in a Southern Brazilian news website - Clic RBS - five days after the special committee approved the initiation of proceedings against Dilma. The theoretical background of the present study is Halliday and Matthiessen’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (2014), specifically the ideational metafunction and its logical component (clauses as logical relations) in Systemic Functional Grammar. First, the clauses were manually identified and segmented based on printed copies of the texts, which were subsequently annotated (n=87). Next, clause complexes were identified and categorized according to their function (expanding, projecting, or embedding). Finally, we described and explained patterns of language use in excerpts from the text. The analysis indicates that the opinion piece is grammatically intricate due to the frequency of both embedded clauses (n=30) and logico-semantic relations of expansion by enhancement (n=16). The non-congruency of the text under analysis is in the high number of embedded clauses because these are rankshifted clauses related to nominal or adverbial groups. These lexical choices are related to the oral register of language, which leads us to hypothesize that it is a strategy the author used to further and obtain broader reaching and acceptance of his political stance on the 2016 Brazilian presidential impeachment.