<em>Yo no soy más que un artista</em>. El ethos discursivo de Castelao en su Defensa do idioma galego (1931)

Abstract

Alfonso Castelao’s speech in defence of the Galician language, delivered during a 1931 parliamentary debate prior to the writing of a new constitution for Spain’s Second Republic, is a masterful piece of oratory which has recently been the subject of several academic analyses (cf. especially Monteagudo 2000a, 2000b). The present paper applies discourse analysis to an examination of the oratorial ethos underpinning Castelao’s speech, viewing his constructed self-image (following Maingueneau 2002) as the product of interactions among a number of prediscourse elements (the speaker’s social role and institutional affiliation) and discourse-level features (lexis, syntax, direct and indirect references to the his own utterances). As the paper will show, and as Castelao himself indeed claimed, the ethos that emerges from Castelao’s speech is not that of a politician or a technician but rather the ethos of an artist. In consequence, the way in which his address is framed, i.e. the “scenography” presupposed by its utterance (Maingueneau 2005), diverges from what one would expect in a parliamentary debate in the direction of something fitting in more with the speaker’s projected self-image. Finally, another feature of Castelao’s discursive ethos is considered briefly, namely his status as representative of the Galician people.