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

56that of establishing the criteria to be followed in defining textual staging or boundariesbetween structural sections in exemplars of one genre.Although the terms have been widely used by Swales and many other researchersin GA, the status of ‘moves’ and ‘steps’ is not clearly stated in the literature. Dudley-Evans (1986) points out that ‘moves’ seem to resist clear definition as to their exactlinguistic configuration. According to him, in Swales’ framework, ‘move’ is a semanticunit that lies between the sentence and the paragraph (ibid.:131).On account of researchers having pointed out difficulties in delimiting boundariesbetween moves 1 and 2 (Dudley-Evans, 1986:131; Nwogu, 1990:58), Swales hasreformulated his earlier (1981) four-move model (Establishing the Field - SummarizingPrevious Research - Preparing for Present Research - Introducing Present Research) intothe currently accepted three-move CARS model (1990). The model has also beencriticized for not predicting the cyclical patterns of occurrence of moves and the absenceof a given move actually found in similar data analysis (Crookes, cited in Dudley-Evans,1986:131).More recently, Paltridge (1994:288) has criticized genre analysts from ESP andsystemic-functional traditions for their insistence in employing linguistic criteria todefine what for him is a non-linguistic, pragmatic category:...one should look for cognitive boundaries in terms of convention, appropriacy,and content, rather than (...) search for linguistically defined boundaries...For Paltridge, work by well-known text analysts such as Swales and Hasanrepresent consistent contributions to the study of discourse but still lack a complete