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

32I found that I could not understand what constituted an appropriate text in anydiscipline without considering the social and intellectual activity which the textwas part in. (Bazerman, 1988:4)In that sense, investigation into academic genres essentially depends on theconsideration of the set of rhetorical actions reoccurring in the discipline. It is thetypification of these rhetorical actions that evoke the classes of texts characterized byregularities in formal elements.For Miller (1984:159), different genres are used to accomplish ‘typified rhetoricalactions based in recurrent situations’, therefore people recognize similarities amongrecurring situations and thus elaborate representations of typified actions. Thisrepresentation is a social, intersubjective construct based on schemata of situationspeople build, based on social experience, in terms of pertinent events, participants, andlanguage. This typification of situations calls for typified rhetorical responses thusbecoming what can be called a genre (ibid.:156-57).In his definition of genre as a class of texts, Todorov (1976:162) aggregates formaland functional aspects. He identifies ‘text’ and ‘discourse’ as synonymous terms to referto ‘a set of enunciations’ whose interpretation is determined grammatically (by thesentence of the enunciation) and pragmatically (by the speech of the sentence itself).Accordingly GA researchers and teachers have often argued that besides analyzingcontext (i.e., the recurrent rhetorical situation in which a genre is used), genre theoristsmust study text (i.e., characteristic forms these utterances assume in specific genres)taking into account that both aspects are interconnected in producing meaning and that