“O mundo tá chato”: algumas notas sobre a dimensão sociocognitiva do politicamente correto na linguagem

Abstract

Drawing from issues of the interaction between language, cognition and society, this essay aims to reflect on the sociocognitive dimensions of political correctness by taking into account some discursive practices in contemporary Brazilian context. We argue that political correctness, as a regulatory body of discursive and social practices, can be taken in a weak sense as a pragmatic resource fundamentally associated to the attempt to promote a high degree of reflexivity of social actors in relation to the production of certain categorizations and/or statements, or in a strong sense - both as a normative system, capable of pointing to desirable symbolic ways of living in society, and as a guide to situations to be overcome, such as social inequality, injustice, prejudice, discrimination, and violence.