Percursos da solidariedade: sobre a legitimação de boatos no mercado financeiro

Abstract

This thesis is built around news, trades and official market communications that bring together social practices common to the universe of the Brazilian financial market. Examples include purchases and sales of securities on behalf of BM&FBovespa SA. The main objective of the investigation is to trace the motivated steps, features, modes, and linguistic-discursive organizations supporting a sociolinguistic phenomenon common in speculative capitalism: the rumor. The focus is on journalistic sources. It is our goal to identify the realizational choices, structuring, and arrangement of lexical terms and clauses as direct or indirect speech (hypotactic and paratactic) that hide fallacies, sustain bluffs, and attract readers' and investors' attention by convincing them to risk their own capital in actions that promise very little or nothing at all. The theoretical assumptions underpinning this work include the critical discourse analysis of Norman Fairclough, the grammatical studies of Michael Halliday and Christian Matthiessen, and the social semiotics of Hodge and Kress. In these, we emphasize, respectively, the formations of sentences and metafunctions from SFG (Systemic-Functional Grammar); the semiotic modes that sustain dissimulation and even the representations, styles, and identities suggested in the discourse. Publications by Nelson Traquina, Ciro Marcondes-Filho and Luiz Carlos Iasbeck are relevant to investigate ethics, journalistic practice and the configuration of rumors. Among the topics discussed are: media information as a product of unsustainable consumption; the hegemonic struggle and the hierarchization between the producer and the consumer of the news and forms of concealment of social agents of information. Through their illustrations, we demonstrate how the sphere of the propagation of relevant facts is opportune and convenient not only for the propagation of legal hypotheses and legitimate projections, but also of deceptive inventions and malfeasance. In this context, the sources consulted by journalists become a significant subject for observation, since the concealment of these agents reveals itself as an efficient strategic choice for the propagation of false speculation or hoaxes.