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

15state), Forensic (involving speeches of prosecution or defense in a court of law of pastactions), and Epideitic (speeches that do not call for any immediate action by theaudience, but that characteristically praise or blame some person or thing, influencingthe audience’s judgment of the person or thing being talked about). The hypothesis isthat the book review involves an evaluative verbal action, so that the book reviewer willuse, in Aristotle’s terms, words of ‘praise and blame’ to convey evaluation to the readerso as to influence the potential readership’s judgment of the book. The assumption isthat within the disciplinary community, the group shares forms of argument and lexiconthat convey common knowledge and constitute rhetorical devices (Leff, 1987:33).3) The third basic hypothesis of this study is that evaluation –– the main functionof the genre book review –– will be realized differently in each disciplinary culture,emphasizing differences in object of study, epistemological organization and values.This variation will serve as evidence that textual features respond to the characteristicculture of each field and, therefore, any suggestions for research or teaching of academicwriting should take into account differences in disciplinary contexts.1.3 Design of the studyFor the purposes stated above, I will develop a genre analysis of academic bookreviews across fields.Such a general schematic description will allow for a distinction between fieldinvariantfeatures, i.e., features that are regularly present in the genre, and those that arefield-dependent, i.e., found to be specific to chemistry, linguistics, and economics.