Implications of a discursive perspective to the construction of a methodology to analyze the language practices

Abstract

This paper presents the construction of a methodological approach in order to investigate in which extent debates on bilingual education for deaf people throughout the nineties in Brazil reproduce classical controversies in studies on deafness. The theoretical approach was Discourse Analysis on an enunciative basis, with a special emphasis on the contributions of Maingueneau. The paper highlights the fact that such a methodology keeps a productive dialogue with the theoretical framework, as well as with the kind of language practices put under analysis. It is pointed out as main results of our research: the existence of a relation between the corpus delimitation and the researcher’s knowledge about the universe investigated; the choice of linguistic features supporting corpus delimitation; specification of the theoretical framework adopted in the analysis of negative utterances which are seen as polemical ones (DUCROT); problematization of the theoretical framework adopted.