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

59which constitute minimal contributions made by a speaker to an exchange. In Swales’terms, these minimal contributions referred to by Coulthard as ‘acts’ receive the name of‘steps’ of each move.Todorov (1976:162) stresses the importance of viewing text as discourse, i.e., aspeech act (as the concept was formulated in the tradition set forth by Wittgenstein(1953) and Austin (1962)), but at the same time, he contends that the study of genresmust rely on the establishment of common properties pertaining to a class of discourses.The analyst must therefore allow for an interaction among the various aspects ofdiscourse, i.e. the semantic aspect, the pragmatic aspects (relation between users), theformal aspects (the materiality of signs), and the syntactic aspects (the relation of theparts among themselves), making any aspect of the discourse obligatory for the purposeof studying that specific genre:The difference between one speech act and another, and thus between one genreand another, can be situated at any one of these levels of the discourse(ibid.:163).Hence the criteria to establish structural boundaries within specific genres must beformal, semantic and functional, just like any linguistic analysis focused on reallanguage should be. Only by using a combined view of language, can one attempt todefine textual cohesion. However, there is a point in Paltridge’s criticism concerning thequestion of where to draw the line along the continuum that stretches between moves,and between moves and steps (e.g., in BRs, where does ‘describing’ stops and