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

264Firstly, BR editors were interviewed as a means to identify generic featurespertaining to text structure and disciplinary context. The interviews provided invaluableinformation about book reviewing practices in academia in general and in eachdiscipline in particular. Secondly, having in mind the information elicited from theeditors, the schematic structure of the genre was defined in terms of the systematicityfound in the rhetorical structure of exemplars of the genre across disciplines. Thirdly,variable features of BRs were examined within the disciplinary context in which textswere produced. The results obtained in each of these three moments are discussed inChapters 3, 5 and 6, respectively.In the investigation of the systematicity of text structure, qualitative andquantitative techniques were adopted, namely, a detailed comparative analysis of 60exemplars of BRs and a computer-oriented survey of the remaining 120 texts in thecorpus. The data in both types of analysis were divided in triads of equal number of textsin each one of the three areas. The detailed qualitative analysis accounted for theorganization of the corpus with 60 BRs into four rhetorical moves and ten ixrhetoricalsub-functions with corresponding linguistic features. Moves were found to have a fixedorder while the Sub-functions, although following a relatively systematic text flow, werefound to occur in a less fixed order and to present variable frequency patterns acrossdisciplines. The qualitative analysis also demonstrated that different patterns of terms ofpraise and blame were used as rhetorical devices to recommend or disqualify a book forthe readership of the journal.