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

30Jamieson is that, after the fall of the roman empire, the catholic church occupied theniche left empty by the roman rulers and, although the context had changed from apolitical to a religious unit of the empire, the generic form used by both the emperor andthe pope to communicate with their followers were similar: use of classical Latin,syntactic complexity, loaded with imperial protocols and exhortations to audience(ibid.:410).The author argues that though immediate circumstance does affect the choice ofrhetorical form, ‘it is sometimes rhetorical genres... that are decisively formative’ so thata traditional form tends to constrain the potential new responses (ibid.:405). The secondexample given by Jamieson is even more illustrative of the power exercised by genre inmaintaining similar forms in different rhetorical situations. The first American state ofthe union addresses (written documents issued by the president from time to time asreports to Congress on the state of the union and recommendations for further legislativeactions) could be traced back to the speeches delivered by British monarchs from thethrone. Clearly opposing situations like that of the newly freed American state from theBritish empire bear similar generic forms of political address attesting that tradition ingeneric form have strong ‘umbilical ties’ (ibid.:411).Jamieson’s debate is important as it makes evident the patterning principle indiscourse. Her approach to written discourse brings forth relationships between text andcontext that would not be noticed if text was viewed in separate, as a linguisticmanifestation in itself.