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

57definition of how discourse and grammatical features systematically interact. Eventhough these authors have isolated various levels of discourse structure, using constructssuch as ‘generic structural potential’ (Hasan) and ‘moves and steps’ (Swales), they havenot fully explained how they reached those definitions.In the specific case of Hasan, patterns of cohesion viii and reference, according toPaltridge (ibid.:289), have revealed themselves insufficient criteria. For one reason,cohesive devices such as conjunctions were found to be ineffective in defining structuralelements such as moves, and lexical chain was found to reach beyond structural elementboundaries (also corroborated by the work of Bhatia (1993)).In relation to Swales (1990), Paltridge (ibid.:295) finds the definition of moves andsteps of research article introductions to be done intuitively, also based on the content ofpropositions. He contends that frameworks for the analysis of structural elements are notable to account for the grammatical explanation of textual aspects. He follows Leech’s(1983) criticism towards the attempt made by some authors in giving grammatical andrhetorical aspects of language the same status and viewing them as integrated. ForLeech, grammar involves rules and categories (ibid.:58), while pragmatics is noncategoricaland thus is constrained by indeterminacy (ibid.:73). Paltridge argues that anyattempt to associate regularities of grammatical aspects with patterning of texts is boundto failure due to the inadequacy of dealing with features that belong to the realm ofpragmatics with a grammatical treatment.However, as pointed out before, some discourse analysts have tended to viewlinguistic analysis as a process involving a complex interconnection of features