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

44of the genre. Typification of the language used with consistency of communicativepurpose in recurrent situations is seen as the defining feature of the genre:By genre I mean a more or less standardized communicative event with a goal orset of goals mutually understood by the participants in that event ...(p. 10)Studying the recursive rhetorical pattern found in different exemplars of researcharticle introductions, Swales elaborates a schematic description of the sequence ofrhetorical moves, each realizing a different communicative function. This schematicdescription consists of generalizations made about how information is organized in agroup of related categories, cases, or events. These categories may differ in regards tothe specific instances in which they are realized (Rumelhart, 1980; Nwogu, 1990).In a later development of his work, Swales (1990) postulates that a communicativeevent encompasses a set of relationships between people that are acting in a certainsocial context, and performing certain roles characteristic to that occasion, in whichlanguage plays an indispensable part. A series of communicative events form a genre ifthey share a set of communicative purposes. Thus, genres are “communicative vehiclesfor the achievement of goals” (ibid.:46) that operate upon the discourse structure,offering constraints for the beginning, the development, and the ending of a text(ibid.:41).Genre-type communicative events include the texts embedded in the event, plusthe processing procedures of encoding and decoding these texts in view of previousknowledge of the world (content schemata), knowledge of previous texts (formal