Identifying and elderly as a speaker: an enunciative analysis

Abstract

The  aim  of  the  discussions  presented  in  this  article  was  to  analyze  the identification  (or  not)  of  a  speaker  with  the  subject-position  of  an  elderly person. We selected an interview from the Portal do Envelhecimento (Aging Portal)  website  as  the  corpus  of  the  analysis.  In  this  interview,  a  book organizer describes her book-drafting process, whose theme focuses on issues related to aging. We based the analysis on the enunciative studies proposed by  Benveniste  (1989,  1995)  and  Guimarães  (1989,  1995,  1996,  2005). This  theoretical  approach  allowed  us  to  observe  how  the  enunciation  was established in that interview. By observing the use of personal pronouns, we performed the linguistic analysis of this material. This enabled us to establish the interviewed author as the focus and, therefore, as the main speaker. As for the other people brought into this enunciation process, the interviewer was referred to as you and the elderly as he. In general, the analysis highlighted the following considerations: a) in the enunciator’s speech, there is a deletion of the you and an alternation between the I and the we, when referring to the first person; b) the use of the we, in some situations, joins the speaker to the group who helped to produce the book, and in others, it is not defined, allowing the interpretation of the he (the elderly) as included; c) such use of pronouns shows that the speaker builds just an implicit identification of the elderly in the
subject-position.