The heroic ethos in Salvador Allende’s Last Speech

Abstract

This article analyzes from a Systemic Functional Linguistics standpoint (SFL) the last speech of Salvador Allende before his death. By means of transitivity and mood analysis (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004), as well as through identification of mechanisms of discursive representation (van Leuween 1996, 2008), the linguistic analysis we propose focuses on how discoursive ethos is constructed. The results show that ethos is built around the sender as an Actor of material processes and Speaker of verbal processes, all enhanced by somatization and abstraction resources. Furthermore, in this speech genre the construction of ethos shares some topics with the militant ethos (Montero 2007), but in its historical particularity takes the topic of heroism and turns it into a key element to the construction of a heroic ethos.