HOW TO DO THINGS WITH WORDS?: A TRAVELLING ON THE DISCURSIVE PRACTICE OF THE INTERAMERICAN BANK OF DEVELOPMENT IN THE YEARS 2000

Abstract

This paper aims to discuss the role of language have
had on the financialization of the real economy and
everyday life. The method is the critical analysis of
the discourse by linguistic quantitative techniques
applied on the annual report of the InterAmerican
Development Bank-IADB released in the first
decade of the 2000s that is related to the taming
process imputed to the Bank by US Treasury on
the late 1980s. Also, this discussion is related to
the growing fiscal crisis in Latin American and the
Caribbean countries, which disrupted the IADB’s
discourse towards the logic of financialization of
commercial banks and further away from its initial
status as a development agency. The paper is
organized in 4 parts, being the first an introduction,
followed by a debate on the pragmatic dimension of
language, a concept developed during the second
half of the twentieth century, and that taken up
in contemporary times to understand the logic of
financialization. In the sequence, the paper shows
the results of the quantitative analysis that explore
the trajectory of some keywords on the IADB annual
report corpus where reveals changes and transitions
of the discursive practice of the Bank. Finally, the
conclusion and bibliographical references.
Keywords: Financialization; Power; Critical Discourse
Analysis; InterAmerican Development Bank; Latin
America and the Caribbean.