POWER THROUGH QUESTIONING: FORMER PRESIDENT LULA?S QUESTIONING

This paper aims to investigate the exercise of institutional power through questions presented by former judge Sergio Moro in former president Luiz Inacio "Lula" da Silva's questioning in may 2017. For this, the questions asked by the former judge at that moment will be analyzed. Questioning is a well-known tool in Linguistics to exercise power, however, regarding the defendant's questioning, no research on Brazilian judicial setting was found. In order to contribute to this research gap, this paper investigates, by means of mixed methods, the control the former judge exer-cises through his questions, and the extent to which the former judge's utterances have adversarial traits. This study draws on Teun A. van Dijk's (2018) approach to critical discourse studies as the main underlying framework. The results show the former judge's questioning style on that questioning carries accusatory traits and resembles police interviews.