Abstract

ANICETO, Paulo Damián. Last words and imminent judgment. Semiotic analysis of defendants’ strategies of inversion during trials for crimes against humanity in Córdoba, Argentina. Intersticios sociales [online]. 2018, n.16, pp.47-95. ISSN 2007-4964.

The study analyzes the discursive strategies displayed in seven utterances recorded in Federal Court of Public Hearings Number 1 in the Argentine city of Córdoba Capital during the stage of proceedings called the accused’s last words. This corpus, which includes statements by seven ex-servicemen accused of committing crimes against humanity during the last civil-military dictatorship in Argentina, is examined by adopting an analytical perspective developed from Landowski’s legal and social semiotics and the French Post-Structuralist school of thought in discourse studies. Our main interests are to question the formal operation of the adjudication of norms to facts, and to inquire into the forms of expression in the defendants’ discourse itself. We identify the grammar of production of the normative referent in utterances with no juridical- penal effects and specify its relations to the norm referred to in accounts of past events, paying special attention to the role of discursive strategies in reversing tensions between professionals and legal-lay people in a semiotic space that functions by juridically-formalizing these tensions.

Keywords : strategies of inversion; last words; crimes against humanity; juridical semiotics.