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

33the study of the patterns of text organization can offer valuable insights about thecommunicative functions of genres.2.2.3 Patterning of rhetorical structureContrary to the more traditional view of the creative character of languageproduction as an unlimited number of new utterances produced out of a limited set oflinguistic rules, Bakhtin sees genres as highly structured forms of discourse to the extentthat, unless speech genres are observed, we would not be able to communicate. If wehad to create discourse form, function, content, and context anew, every time we tookpart in the speech process, communication would be virtually impossible. This view ongenre as a discursive form accentuates its culturally institutionalized character and itsintertextuality.In Discourse Analysis, researchers such as Labov and Waletzky (1967) hadalready proposed a systematization of the regularities above sentence level in theirinvestigation of the discursive structure of personal narratives. They defined certainregularities considered to allow a text to be produced and recognized by participants ofan interaction as an adequate instance of language use for that context. Working withoral narratives in English, they defined the rhetorical progression of the information inthe text in terms of six sections: abstract, orientation, complication, evaluation,resolution, and coda. This pattern of narrative discourse and the rhetorical sections ofcomplication and evaluation are predominant features in the characterization of thegenre for native speakers of English.