Manifestações em Brasília no período pós-eleitoral

In this article, we aim to analyze verbal violence (Amossy, 2017; Cabral 2018, 2020) in Twitter comments, observing how aggressive and hostile language constitutes a relevant strategy for building ethos. To do so, we selected a set of comments to the tweet of former president Jair Bolsonaro, on January 8, 2023. Thus, considering the relevance of analytical categories of Textual Linguistics for argumentative discourse analysis (Cavalcante et al., 2020,2022), we chose referencing as a textual criterion possible to be mobilized for the analysis of argumentativeness in controversial interactions and we assume that verbal violence, according to Cabral (2018, 2020), is located in a framework in which subjects use ad hominem arguments to argumentatively mark the distance in relation to the other and to build an image of oneself. Based on the analysis carried out, we conclude that discourse objects i) contribute to the establishment, maintenance and updating of the polemical interaction and ii) constitute, in the polemical game, a relevant resource of verbal violence, reinforcing the dichotomous nature of the controversy, as well as a strategy for building an ethos.