Pixo, Logo existo: Atos de Fala e Performatividade do gênero pixação

Abstract

This study investigates the textual genre pixação (a specific style of Brazilian graffiti) in light of the pragmatic theory of speech acts and the theoretical foundations of Textual Linguistics, with the objective of understanding the linguistic-textual and social dynamics that organize it. The research is based on the premise that the pixações not only communicates visually, but perform performative actions on the urban space, constituting speech acts with specific functions and purposes. To do so, a quali-quantitative approach is taken on the measure with a corpus of 80 pixações containing verbal content, whose utterances are classified according to Austin's (1990) theory of illocutionary speech acts to identify their functions and frequencies. The research’s results show a predominance of expositives acts (73,75%), followed by exercitives (13,75%) and behabitives (12,5%) acts. The analysis evidences how contextual elements, specially the urban surface (the support), are intrinsic to the speech act, affecting its illocutionary force. The study concludes that pixação establishes itself as a genre that utilizes the performativity of language as a tool to reclaiming space, for social criticism, and for the construction of identities, operating as an act of existence and resistance on the social urban field.