The unspoken in the discourse: effects of meaning on traffic signs about indigenous presence

Abstract

Our goal is to analyze the discursive functioning of the traffic signs about the presence of indigenous people on the RS 406 and RS 324 highways. Traffic signs are a speech and, as such, present effects of meanings that can naturalize stereotyped and prejudiced sayings. The assumptions of discourse studies, especially by Pêcheux (1997), Bakhtin (2004) and Orlandi (1998), guide our reflections on the meaning of words and their linguistic materiality. In AD, we work on the understanding of language as non-transparent and also in the subject's relationship with language from the outside, language consisting of symbolic, social, historical and ideological elements, inscribed in the conditions in which they are (re)produced. Based on this meaning, the recognition of minimum guarantees of indigenous identity, the result of several struggles, marks the right to territory, a place that is still disputed today and for which new discourses are constructed, establishing new subjects. That's what the traffic signs show. In them, meanings emerge propagated by the reproduction of the colonizer´s discourse, whose knowledge constitutes the social imaginary about the indigenous people as subjects deprived - rationally and culturally - of autonomous living conditions, in need of preservation.