TERMOS DE ELOGIO E CRÍTICA EM RESENHAS ACADÊMICAS EM LINGÜÍSTICA, QUÍMICA E ECONOMIA

Résumé

Research in Discourse Analysis has indicated the importance of studying functional-rhetorical features of genres in connection with parent discourse communities. This paper discusses how the study of the interplay between text and context can lead to a better understanding of variations within one academic genre across fields. Drawing from the Sociology of Science and Genre Analysis, academic disciplines are defined as discourse communities that act as powerful frameworks for meaning production in text. Sixty academic book reviews divided evenly among linguistics, chemistry, and economics are analyzed for their rhetorical structure and for the communicative goal of the genre, namely that of evaluating knowledge production.The book reviews in the corpus were expected to present certain general invariable features of rhetorical organization in content and form that allow writers and readers to recognize them as belonging to the same genre. At the same time, some variation was expected in features most closely associated with the traditions and conventions of the discourse community. The results indicated that textual features respond to the characteristic culture of each field and to institutional discourses. Consequently, teaching and research practices invovling academic written genres should consider disciplinary evaluative practices. These results may contribute to the debate about the definition of generic textual boundaries and the ethnographic character of genre studies.