universidade federal de santa catarina pós-graduação em letras ...

1064.1 The corpusThe corpus of the analysis comprehends a total of one-hundred-and-eighty (180)BRs containing 174,364 words, representing a sum of an equal number of texts extractedfrom linguistics, economics, and chemistry journals, forming three groups of sixty (60)texts from each discipline. The 180 texts for the corpus were collected from researchjournals between November 1993 and March 1994 ix .These 180 texts are analyzed in two moments. First, a smaller corpus of 60 texts(20 in each discipline, encompassing 55,925 words) undergoes a detailed analysis fortheir rhetorical moves. This first moment of the data analysis, consisting of a detailedexamination of a restricted number of exemplars of BRs in the corpus, is called the‘qualitative analysis’.In the second moment, all 180 texts are analyzed for terms of praise and blameacross disciplines. As stated before, it is assumed that the frequency with whichreviewers use certain terms to evaluate books and the nature of these terms can, to acertain extent, indicate how evaluative discourses vary across disciplinary boundaries.Therefore, with the help of a microconcord program, patterns of occurrence ofevaluative terms are verified quantitatively (if certain terms are more or less frequent inone discipline than in another) and the context in which they occur. This second momentin the data analysis is called ‘quantitative analysis’.As will be seen in the following chapters, each of the so-called ‘qualitative’ textanalysis and ‘quantitative’ analysis of evaluative terms consists of a combination of