Dialogic Analysis of Discourses Mobilized by Defendants Accused of Femicide in Jury Trial

Abstract

This article aims to analyze how discourses of defendants accused of femicide in Jury Trial are axiologically constituted. Based on Dialogic Discourse Analysis (DDA), two murderers’ testimonies taken in the 2018-2020 triennium were analyzed. Considering the extralinguistic dimension of utterances, results point out that: a) in the Jury chronotope, defendants’ discourses present as defensive-victimistic-accusative; b) in the ideological legal sphere, their discourses are made hybrid as intimate-everyday, moral, and legal; c) in the specific situation of discursive interaction, discourse materializes as pro-formahierarchical-bivocal, while permeated by dialogical relations with the law. In the linguistic dimension, both stylistically and compositionally, murderers tensely express negative images of the women victims, describing them as traitors, deceitful, jealous, hysterical, provocative, maladjusted, and aggressive, among others. They build up images of themselves as victimized and disturbed men who had been provoked to act.