Foreign language, corporealities and knowledge in media discourse events

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss discourses concerning foreign language (lack of) knowledge from the investigation of corporealities in media events, more specifically, in some commercials of private language institutes, common in Brazil, at the present time. We are anchored in the theoretical and methodological scope of discursive and visual materialities studies in interface with Applied Linguistics and, we analysed some verbal-visual-corporal utterances, whose discursive resonances point to regularities of meanings in the relation body-subject-foreign language. The analyses suggest the functioning of two main discursive axis: the axis of corporealities in opposition, based on totalizing and homogeneous representations of language, which produce effects of exclusion in the foreign language; and the axis of corporealities in similitude, based on the representation of English as a universal and sovereign language, able to include everyone. These discourses, circulating socio-historically, legitimate and naturalize meanings that, on their turn, affect the (im)possible spaces of enunciability attributed to subjects in an another language.

Keywords

• Língua inglesa. Corporalidade. Discurso midiático-publicitário.