“OUR TRAM IS SINISTER”: BREGA-FUNK AS A REPRESENTATION OF RECIFE’S SOCIOECONOMIC INEQUALITY
periphery; speech; transitivity; Critical Discourse Analysis; Systemic-Functional Linguistics.
This research seeks to investigate how the relationship between socioeconomic inequality in the city of Recife and the discourse present in brega-funk songs occurs. To this end, recent data on the topic involving the capital of Pernambuco were collected and debated, especially based on the contributions of Soares (2021). A historical contextualization of the city's founding and the establishment of its current center-periphery configuration was also carried out. Based on studies by Orlandi (2004; 2017), brega-funk was presented as a phenomenon that reflects and produces conflicts between Recife's socioeconomic classes and as a practice that establishes an intrinsic equivalence between the periphery and the peripherals/ those of the city. The corpus is made up of five songs by different authors that have more than one million views on the video platform YouTube, having been released since 2018, which is considered the year in which brega-funk achieved national success. The songs were analyzed based on Critical Discourse Analysis, more specifically on Norman Fairclough's (2003) approach to discourse as a representation of social events, using the clause transitivity system as a linguistic criterion, according to the guidelines of Systemic-Functional Linguistics of Halliday and Matthiessen (2014).