A discursivização do conceito da Troika em artigos da imprensa escrita portuguesa: um espelho do que a Troika é para nós?

Abstract

Media discourse simultaneously reflects and shapes the social environment in which it operates and is therefore an ideal starting point to evaluate ideological positions on a specific subject. Thus, the objective of this article is to examine how the Portuguese press (especially opinion articles, humorous articles, and cartoons) is currently dealing with the concept of 'troika', the word used to designate the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Union. Two corpora were built for this purpose covering the period between the arrival of the troika in Portugal and the present day, and all the occurrences of the lexeme 'troika' were identified and then analyzed through a semanticpragmatic examination of predicators, their arguments, and their respective semantic roles. The analysis led to the conclusion that 'troika' appears in the corpora as an agentive entity that controls and triggers changes in an affected entity, generally identified as 'the Portuguese government / the Portuguese State / the Portuguese'. In the humorous texts, it is not the lexeme 'troika' which usually triggers humor, but rather some linguistic aspect unrelated to it. This observation led to the hypothesis that, in the time span analyzed, the matter was faced as either too serious or too worrying to be laughed at. In other words, neither the Portuguese public opinion nor opinion makers had yet acquired the sufficient critical distance that would allow them to have a more liberating view of the matter.