The Term Diversidade (en. Diversity) and Its Displacement on News Portals: from Didactic to Polemical Discourse

Abstract

This article analyzes the polemical and didactic discourses on the materiality of the term diversidade [diversity] as it has circulated, from 2006 to 2022, on news portals. Guided theoretically by French Discourse Analysis and methodologically by the tool AntConc, the corpus indicates a mutation in the dominant meaning effects of the pivot-term as it stops participating in a completive structure such as diversidade de espécies [diversity of species] to become an intransitive word. This process involves a transition and coexistence with the structures of diversidade sexual [sexual diversity] and diversidade (e.g., in the coordinated phrase diversidade e inclusão [diversity and inclusion]). The didacticism regarding the description of diversidade in biological or environmental terms is replaced by the controversy marked by the topicality of the identity agenda. Maintaining the coexistence of both terms, this article demonstrates that there is an appropriation of the word by the market economy.