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

282are for the most part equally unconcerned with fundamental questions ofepistemology, because they take their discipline to be firmly based and not...open to fruitful debate;...Perhaps chemists are altogether too secure of the grounds over which theirdiscipline stands and therefore take a lot for granted as common, indisputableknowledge, allowing themselves a much broader common ground than do youngersciences such as linguistics. These factors comprehend basic differences betweenchemistry and linguistics that may account for further differences in specific features ofthe genre BR.Making an analogy with Dudley-Evans’ (1986:132) discussion on the review ofliterature section of RA’s, it seems that the appearance of reference to the literary traditionin the field in BRs is conditioned by the nature of the field in which the text appears. Inthat respect, one can certainly hypothesize that some BRs in fields that have a longreviewing tradition like linguistics, for example, will mention previous publications moreoften than BRs in fields where book reviewing is rare or totally absent (like physics, forexample, as pointed out by Chen, 1976).7.4 Theoretical implicationsThe most obvious implication that an ethnographic-type of inquiry may have forthe specific genre analysis of BRs is that it provides the analyst with a clearer and moreaccurate view of how disciplinary cultures function and how academic genres perform acommunicative function within different disciplinary matrices. By knowing how thefield works in terms, for example, of what constitutes valuable characteristics in books,