THE SOCIO-POLITICAL IMPACT OF DEAF LEADERS' DISCOURSE IN ARGENTINA

Abstract

Currently, Argentina is the scenario of the socio-political impact of the discourse of Deaf leaders. Since the 90’s, in the middle of the most dramatic economic crisis, the excluded fought to find new identities and the Deaf political discourse or DPD emerges. The social sciences discourse and its practices produced the legitimation of Argentine Sign Language (LSA) and we the linguists function as organic researchers. Deaf people start to become literate through the use of new technologies and outside formal school. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the information distribution through Functional Linguistics and Discourse Analysis in a corpus gathered in the year 2007. The analysis of theme and rheme will show the aims and subjects DPD threw into the arena of socio-political fight. We further hypothesize the existence of Event Theme and Event Rheme which clearly belong to a discursive practice that acts dialectically –in Lacan’s terms– in order to change social practice. These two discourses  –Deaf leaders and linguistics- intend to generate an intertext tension which is fragmenting dominant discourse.