On the conditions for recognizing J. Milei's speech. Press reports of the speech given on october 12, 2024

Abstract

From the so-called French discourse analysis school, we know that every text can be read based on its conditions of production or recognition. We undertook this research to answer the question of how Javier Milei's speech as president of Argentina is read/recognized just a few months after his inauguration. In particular, we are interested in comparing a public speech by the Argentine president with the versions published by four national newspapers (La Nación, Infobae, DiarioAr, and Página 12). This is the speech delivered on October 12, 2024, at the renaming ceremony for the Néstor Kirchner Cultural Center. The choice is not fortuitous because it concerns a controversial discourse in three senses: a) it was an act of refounding a Kirchnerist work; b) it explicitly confronted national universities during a conflict over their funding; and c) it updated the civilization/barbarism binomial precisely on October 12. From a theoretical and methodological perspective, we approach the corpus from a critical and functional perspective (Fairclough, 1993). We specifically focus on the interpersonal metafunction, using Appraisal Theory with a special interest in the engagement system (Martin and White, 2005) to account for heteroglossic procedures. We also complement the analysis of the cited word from the enunciative perspective offered by Zoppi-Fontana (1986). We maintain that heteroglossic procedures predominate in the four articles, with attribution and refutation phenomena, although they differ in constructing a clear polarization of editorial positions oriented for or against Javier Milei's administration.