ONE SPEAKER, DIFFERENT COMMUNICATIVE SITUATIONS: ETHICAL BEHAVIOURS

Abstract

Purpose: The rhetorical theory allows us to declare that the speaker's figure, when it is discursively well constructed, has a great persuasiveness capacity. This image is called ethos . Our research aims at showing the relationships between genres, communicative purposes and ethos . Methods: to achieve this purpose, we analyze two distinct genres: a stand-up comedy show, presented by Danilo Gentili in comedy central , and an interview, granted by Father Fabio de Melo to Gentili on the TV show The noite . The speaker, focus of our analysis, is Danilo Gentili. We chose two different genres performed by one speaker alone in order to analyze how genres and communicational situations interfere in the ethos construction. The linguistic choices of the speaker function as ethical evidences since the subjectivity of language allows us to glimpse aspects that are closely related to the speaker. Results: we concluded, by analyzing the first genre, the stand-up comedy, that Gentili presents himself as a frank, honest and controversial speaker. We also showed that his genre choice allows him to do comedy and to reach his communicative purpose in a very similar way to that which guides his philosophy of life. The analysis of the second genre, the interview, shows that, although the communicative situation does not belong to the humorous domain, the speaker keeps his frank, honest and controversial features. For this, he uses a fairly common discursive genre, the interview, adapting it to his needs, that is, he uses the plasticity of genres in favor of his purposes.