<b>Suicide for reasons unstated, covering letters and suicide notes for textual/discursive and rhetorical reading

Abstract

Current research is a study on linguistic forms and argumentative processes in texts written by suicidal people. The corpus was collected from police investigation files in the Brazilian National Archives in Rio de Janeiro (cases between 1890 and 1940). An analytical model was developed by textual and discursive analyses, alternated and complemented by rhetorical aspects. The main aim was to demonstrate that the suicide’s enunciation was foregrounded on more or less stable argumentative trends and aimed at the construction of conditions to justify the act. Analysis showed that the harvested documents fitted in a plan of representations constructed on actions, in two stages, or rather, the choice of voluntary death and the preparation of the message. The latter was not always focused on presenting justifications for the suicidal act. It is the case of the documents listed in current paper, or rather, notes and messages with unstated causes of suicide.

Keywords

• argumentação
• produções de suicidas
• linguística textual
• retórica