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

43precise representation of the rhetorical structure of academic genres. Such generalcategories may not be able to account for the total range of variation within the samegenre.The form of discourse is an additional question that is not fully developed byHasan, but which needs to be accounted for in approaching a highly conventionalizedsystem of texts such as that representing academia’s repertoire of genres.2.3 A move-analytical approach to academic discourseWork in GA can be thought of as a developing tradition in the study of academicdiscourse: in the process of investigating how academy members use genres tocommunicate, researchers still need a complete inventory of the system of academicgenres. The fact that the academic BR has not been studied from a genre-analyticalapproach is evidence of this on-going status of academic discourse research. In thisstudy, I will offer an adaptation of Swales’ model of article introductions to BRs inorder to define the rhetorical structure of a yet little investigated genre. The model willbe discussed in the next sections in relation to the genre to which it was originallyconceived, the Research Article, and to two other genres to which the model wasadapted, Abstracts and Dissertations.2.3.1 Move analysis of research article introductionsIn his seminal work on the rhetorical organization of article introductions, Swales(1981) demonstrates how a number of texts considered as exemplars of the same genredisplay a typified rhetorical structure in response to a consistent communicative purpose