Image and argumentation. The official discourse about Malvinas

Abstract

This paper analyses an audiovisual discourse produced in 2012 in tribute to Malvina’s War veterans. The video is an official propaganda, made by the argentinian National Presidency led by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, in the context of the imminent celebration of the Olympic Games in London. The interest of the approach relies on the polemic the video generated, shown by its fast viralisation, and the update of discussions about the island’s sovereignty conflict. The aim of this article is to analyze how argumentation is contructed in audiovisual discourse, minding both dimensions visual and verbal. With that purpose, we will embrace the perspective of pragma-dialectic theory (van Eemeren y Grootendorst, 1984, 2004; Groarke, 2002), which postulates that images could be understood as speech acts.