Abstracts - Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

MARIA MEDIANEIRA DE SOUZA, UNIVERSIDADE FEDERAL DE PERNAMBUCO,BRAZILVERBAL PROCESSES AND DISCOURSE CONSTRUCTION IN THE DISSERTATIONGENREThis research aims at investigating aspects related to discourse construction in theway verbal processes work in the master’s degree dissertation genre.This way, therole of transitivity in this genre is analyzed according to the Systemic Functionaltheoretical perspective, investigating, specifically, the verbal processes and theirparticipants, attempting to describe and interpret the functions performed by thistype of process, responsible for discourse, in dissertations, as well as investigatingits contribution to the construction of meaning in this specific genre. Furthermore,this research aims at understanding the role that this process, responsible for theintroduction of an external voice, performs in this genre. The results reveal that theuse of the verbal processes are associated to the argumentative content of thedissertation, once these external voices, introduced and established by theseprocesses, work as authoritative arguments, and not only as dialogical sequences,as in the case of oral narratives or as reports of dialogues, in the case of writtennarratives. These results contribute to the description and analysis of verbalprocesses in Portuguese, following the Systemic-functional approach in Brazil – SãoPaulo and Pará, for instance – in other textual genres, in our case, the dissertationrequired for a master’s degree.PAPER SESSION 6A - ROOM 1 - WEDNESDAY 27, JULYISFC38 Book of Abstracts Page 132 Lisbon, July 2011