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

292.2.1 Patterns in discourseTheorists have criticized ESP practitioners’ former initiatives in GA that eitherstudied text form in a decontextualized mode or those that focused on discursiveformations without regard for linguistic features (Fairclough, 1992a). The first ones havebeen blamed for missing the sociolinguistic implications in the use of language (Johns,1993), the latter, for not being able to analyze discourse at all (Halliday, 1985:xvii).Thus new conceptions of genre have attempted to propose a more holistic view ofdiscourse as the language used in association with recurring contexts and functions.In the origin of the discussion about genre, scholars have pointed out theconstraining character of genre over reading and writing activities, as a literaryinstitution that functions as ‘horizons of expectation’ for readers, and as ‘models ofwriting’ for authors (Todorov, 1976:163). In that sense, the very existence of a precedentgenre is seen as a patterning constraint to other textual exemplars to be defined asbelonging to a given class. Different genres are considered to have patterns of textualand contextual features, i.e., patterns in terms of the use that writers make of language toattain certain communicative purposes and in terms of the situation with which genresare associated.Jamieson (1975) clearly stresses the rhetorical constraints of antecedent genres inmodeling rhetorical communication, discussing how, in facing unprecedented situations,writers model their response on precedent, traditional genre forms. As an example, shecites the papal encyclical of 1978 which, she argues, is modeled after a protocol used inwritten communication during the roman empire. The historical reason given by