PARAPHRASTIC REFORMULATIONS IN CONCILIATION COURT HEARINGS
Keywords: Interaction. Conciliation court hearings. Reformulation strategies. Paraphrasing. Understanding.
In this research, we aim to investigate paraphrastic reformulations in conciliation court hearings, defined as oral events held in the legal sphere when the parties involved participate in self-composition with a view to end the dispute. Thus, we are interested in understanding how face-to-face interactions established in such a context are constructed textually and discursively, given that the participants must follow guidelines previously established by a legal institution. Therefore, due to our interest in these events, we seek to identify, describe, analyze and interpret the paraphrases that occur in the reformulation of speech in such audiences, considering syntactic-lexical choices, as well as any functions developed in the course of the interaction. Thus, based mainly on postulates of Conversational Analysis and Textual Linguistics, we seek to establish an understanding of interaction as an activity in which it is possible to observe the different choices (textual and discursive) made by the interactants in the production of meanings in the aforementioned context. In this case, the interactional activity is organized during the process of its realization, leaving visible marks of the textual-discursive and interactional structuring, including the paraphrase. Our work is based on the contributions of Fuchs (1985), the works of Hilgert (1989, 1997, 2001, [2006] 2015), among others who have addressed the phenomenon under scrutiny. In this sense, we understand paraphrases as procedures that enable textual reformulation while considering contingency factors to interactional activity. Based on this understanding, we observe the guidelines provided in legal documents (among them the Code of Civil Procedure, resolution 125/2010 of the National Justice Council and other Brazilian official documents), to provide considerations about self-composition, a policy adopted in conciliation court hearings as a practice that implies the use of textual reformulation strategies such as the paraphrase. In this context, methodologically, we follow the principles of a qualitative and inductive approach to this investigation, with the corpus consisting of 15 conciliation court hearings held, specifically, in the civil court of a judicial district of a city in the state of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. Following the guidelines of Conversation Analysis, we recorded audiences on video and transcribed their constitutive statements using the system adopted by Projeto de Norma Urbana Culta (NURC). In the analyses carried out according to the occurrences of such reformulations, we made general observations on how the paraphrases occur mainly due to the need of the speakers to specify certain pieces of information and to make definitions by following a matrix statement.