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In Argentina, food and nutrition diseases are complex social problems that cover a wide range, from malnutrition deaths in a food producer country, to bulimia and anorexia in middle-class youth, among other issues like the increase in cases of diabetes and heart disease linked to the non-stopping growth of obesity. These problems mentioned are related to urgent situations, that even though rises from different social and economic contexts, the State should provide an answer. Obesity has become a central issue for the public agenda since excess weight has ceased to be the healthy signal of physical and economic well-being to become a disease, which must be fought by all means. Different programs have been carried out by the State to control and prevent it, with the collaboration of private sectors, including specialized medical centers. They propose different medical approaches, with their theoretical assumptions and therapeutic approaches, which are fundamental, because they are performative, both on disease control, as to the subjectivity, practices and lifestyles of the patient. In this paper we will analyze the discourse of the support groups for the therapies of obesity of patients in undergoing treatment. We will address the interactions in groups, managed by the participants themselves through the mobile networks, which set the determining weight of the medical assumptions about their identities, behaviors and attitudes. Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1995, 2003, 2006), from a multimodal perspective (Kress, 2010) and qualitative (Guba and Lincoln, 1994) is the theoretical and methodological framework of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to study the discursive polemic regarding the proposed new schema of agro-export taxes that took place in Argentina during the first half of the year 2008. In this context, the presence of ideological signs (Voloshinov, 1976 [1926]), that are the focus of discursive struggles for the imposition of different accentuations, becomes an important indicator of the construction of the discursive polemic. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the circulation of the signs campo and distribución, in particular, with the objective of determining their role in the struggle to establish discursive iniciative (Raiter et al., 1999) within said polemic. To that end, we analyze and contrast, in public speeches of the argentinean President, on the one hand, and of leaders of the agrarian organizations oposed to the new tax, on the other, the acentuations that these two signs acquire. In the first place, we consider the lexical-semantic relations at play (Dubois, 1962), as well as the role of these signs in the configuration of different topics (Van Dijk, 1978) that organize these discourses' local meanings. Furthermore, in order to specify the various ways in which these topics are constructed, we also take into account the components of political discourse defined by Verón (1984), as well as the presence of forms of manifest heterogeneity (Authier-Revuz, 1984) in the discursive and interdiscursive linkage of topics. The analysis reveals the complexity of one of the possible nodes of this polemic: the role of the State in the generation of economic growth and the equitable distribution of its effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we develop an analysis of the political discourse of Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (CFK), President of Argentina. We choose a series of discourses that were enunciated between the 25.3.08 and 17.7.08 during a conflict that faces the government and rural proprietors. It is our main concern for several years to define the specificity of the political discourse. We differentiate, for that reason, here, political discourse out of political public discourse. We set out our theoretical assumptions: social representations, dominant discourse and Agenda. For the analyses we used the notion of conjuncture and we looked where the syntax is made more complex to begin the analyses. Finally we display a criterion of corpus selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the study of politeness phenomena, small talk is an area that has gained in interest and popularity over recent years (cf. Coupland, 2000b). Given its close connection with phatic communion (Malinowski, 1972 [1923]), it constitutes a valuable resource for maintaining friendly relations in social interaction. This paper deals with the interactional dynamics of small talk in a dialectal variety of Argentinean Spanish, namely Buenos Aires Spanish. It does so from a sociolinguistic perspective, but it also builds on sociocultural pragmatics. The aim of the study is to investigate how small talk operates in both institutional and noninstitutional settings in terms of socio-discursive and pragmatic strategies, and to identify some of the functions that it fulfills. The corpus analysed consists of a range of data collected in Bahía Blanca in the form of notes from participant observation as well as recordings of naturally occurring face-to face interactions. Also included is some consideration of how members of the community under study perceive (Placencia, 2001) and interpret (Gumperz, 1982a; Tannen, 1996) the phenomena in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]