Intertextuality as argumentative strategy

a creative process in songs

Abstract

Textual Linguistics (TL), the field to which this article belongs, has maintained that all texts are argumentative and that the act of arguing is not limited to persuading the interlocutor to agree with a particular idea, but also to the attempt to influence, redirect, problematize, question or reinforce previous positions, even if they are not explicitly stated in the utterance, through various argumentative strategies, one of which is intertextuality, a highly effective resource for this purpose. We reiterate that the discourses present in songs, acknowledging that “song” is a multimodal genre, are also guided by the act of arguing, one of the directions of this orientation being the use of intertextuality, whether in its strict or broad form (Carvalho, 2018). It becomes imperative to verify the functioning of the relationship between excerpts of songs, argumentativity and intertextuality. Thus, the primary objective of this study is to analyze the song “Super” by the singer and songwriter Jão, who employs intertextuality in the creative process of his music. For this purpose, we draw on studies in the field of TL, particularly concerning intertextuality, broad and strict (Cavalcante et al., 2022). In order to achieve the objective proposed by this study, the methodology followed an interpretative approach, exploring fragments of the mentioned song, making it possible to analyze how the process of intertextuality occurs in argumentative construction and the intertexts with which the highlighted excerpts relate. We present how excerpts from “Super” reveal intertextuality as a supporting method for the success of argumentation.