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

203CHAPTER 6DISCIPLINARY DISCOURSES6.0 IntroductionThe text analysis in Chapter 5 produced evidence supporting one of the threehypotheses of the present study (Chapter 1), i.e., that the texts that comprehend thecorpus will present certain general invariable features of rhetorical organization that willnot vary across disciplines. The analysis revealed that the genre of academic BRs has arather stable structure of moves and sub-functions across disciplines and that thisstability is reflected in the existence of a set of linguistic clues that normally occur atspecific points along the texts in the corpus, acting as signaling devices for moves andsub-functions.Parallel to this structural systematicity in exemplars of the genre, signs ofvariability across disciplinary boundaries were noticed in text length, number and orderof sub-functions, and vocabulary used to evaluate. Such variation can be interpreted asevidence for another hypothesis of the study: that textual features respond to variationsin contextual configuration, i.e., differences in what disciplinary cultures conceive astheir object of study, epistemological organization and values.The analysis presented in the remaining of this chapter provides a view ofacademic fields as cultures that construct discourse in response to specific epistemicconditions of the discipline (Foucault, 1973). Having in mind that there is a continuity