As relações dialógicas presentes em um processo judicial de vara de família: da petição inicial à sentença

Abstract

The current research presents an analysis of the dialogical relations in the procedural pieces that compose a family court action – a food review - from the judicial district of Franca, São Paulo State. The procedural actions of food review reflect a conflict of interest between two parties, but in order to this conflict be judged and reach a veredict given by a judge, it is necessary the production of procedural pieces that support the defense arguments. These procedural pieces are constituted by different discursive genres common to the legal sphere, among them, the initial petition, the defense and the sentence - corpus of this study. Each piece of a process comprises a statement that, according to Bakhtin (2006), consists of a thematic content, a style, and a compositional form. This study seeks to observe, in the linguistic materiality of the selected pieces, how the elements of each statement are constructed and how they respond to the needs of the legal sphere. To understand this enunciative process, the dialogical relations in the plays are analyzed: between the explicit and implicit subjects and between the different genres composed by them. In the dialogues established in each piece of the corpus - initial petition and defense - and among them, there is the argumentative power that leads the judge's gaze, his approach to the litigants and his decision when giving the sentence. This study shows that Bakhtinian concepts of gender, dialogism, and sphere of activity contribute to the understanding of how language in procedural pieces is designed to convince the judge about the litigants’ rights. Thus, the piece in which argumentative power is most consistent has the consent of the judge.