Augusto Soares da Silva

Augusto Soares da Silva

Catholic University of Portugal

    • Full Professor of Linguistics at the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences, the Catholic University of Portugal (Braga). 
    • Research focuses on lexical semantics, grammar and conceptualisation, linguistic variation and change within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics and from an empirical, usage-based perspective. 
    • Specific focus on metaphor, ideology and discourse. 
National identity, polarisation and socio-culturally situated construal operations: The case of far-right populism in Brazil and Portugal

This presentation explores three interrelated dimensions of the relationship between polarisation and identity: 1) how national identity is represented in polarising populist narratives; 2) how these polarising representations of national identity are cognitively and discursively construed; and 3) how socio-cultural and environmental settings shape polarising construal operations and the discursive construction of both identity and polarisation. Building on previous comparative work on Spanish and Brazilian far-right populisms (Peterssen & Soares da Silva, in press), the analysis now compares representations of national identity in the far-right populist narratives of Jain Bolsonaro, former president of Brazil, and André Ventura, leader of the Portuguese party Chega.  

The study adopts a critical usage-based socio-cognitive approach to language and discourse (e.g., Hart 2014; Koller 2014; Romano & Porto 2016; Van Dijk 2018) and applies a profile-based methodology (Gries 2010; Glynn 2016; Soares da Silva 2021) focusing on the representation of the nation social actors. The polarising potential of five construal operations (Langacker 2008; Hart 2015) – namely image schemas or schematisation (especially force-dynamic schemas), metonymy, profiling, specificity, and metaphor – is systematically examined. The critical and socio-cognitive analysis of these construal operations yields three main representations of national identity: the nation as oppressed victim, the nation as rebellious victim, and the nation as rescued victim. Whereas the representation of the nation as an oppressed victim is most salient in Ventura’s discourse, the nation as a rescued victim is particularly prominent in Bolsonaro’s narrative. These representations are mostly carried out by the construal operations of metaphor, schematisation and profiling, with metonymy and specificity occupying a complementary polarising role. 

Crucially, these polarising construal operations – and their key role in integrating far-right nativist exclusionary ideologies within into collective national identities – are motivated by distinct socio-cultural and environmental settings within the same language. In Bolsonaro’s narrative, the construction of the nation as a rescued victim, alongside the portrayal of Bolsonaro and his government as saviours and protectors of the people, is closely linked to religion, particularly evangelical churches, and their significant role in the emergence and consolidation of populism in Brazil. By contrast, Ventura’s polarisation of the nation as an oppressed victim is associated with exaggerated narratives of immigration-related threat, metonymically instantiated in billboards such as “Portugal is not Bangladesh,” as well as with the misleading claim of saving Portugal from “50 years of corruption” since the democratic revolution of April 1974, exemplified by slogans such as “50 years of corruption. It’s time to say CHEGA (‘enough’)”.