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

63Register for Halliday (1985), Genre for Swales (1990), and GSP for Hasan (1985), forexample, all refer to the same general concept of language variation according to thecontext, the purposes, and the people involved. Common points of intersection amongapproaches to genre (e.g., Kress, 1993; Martin, 1992; Swales, 1990; Miller, 1984;Hasan, 1985) account for the well-known image of the impossibilities of defining genredue to the fluidity of text typologies, defined as ‘blurred genres’ (Todorov, 1976; Geertz,1983).In the present study, genre is conceived as a schema, a prototypical representationof the patterns for communicative utterances in a given context which is put to use bythe production and interpretation of utterances in concrete situations (Ongstad, 1992). Inanalyzing the texts in the corpus, I will try to define a schematic description of themoves (along a continuum between more or less typical moves) that are present inconcrete examples of BRs. The prototype defined here, however, points towardspropensities in the genre, not to absolute accountability of rhetorical moves (Swales,personal communication).2.5.3 The status of Genre AnalysisFinally, perhaps in discussing the third question regarding the status of GA as atext-bound or an ethnographic study, we can bring up Leech’s discussion on pragmaticsin which he states that text and rhetoric belong to the realm of pragmatics and thatpragmatics is the study of how utterances have meanings in situations. Following fromthis definition, context is obviously greatly important for the study of text (‘text acquires