Comentários polémicos e discriminatórios na Internet: estudos de caso

The aim of this paper is to verify how linguistic strategies inserted in social networks and digital media texts and discourses can show race and gender discriminations. Our study is based on textual-discursive approaches that consider the importance of contextual aspects for the materialization of texts. Our interest is to first analyze the comments and ‘heated’ debates caused by a Brazilian journalist social media post and then look at the linguistic strategies that built up this controversy. Our study provides some evidence that FTAs and FFAs - Brown and Levinson (1987), Kerbrat-Orecchioni (2005) - are important linguistic tools for showing different points of view about controversial themes. Moreover the existence of an antagonistic counter-discourse, with a double strategy: both to demonstrate a thesis or refute an adverse thesis is an important strategy to provoke controversy in the public sphere, as Angenot (1982: 32) points out.