O gênero requerimento: uma análise dos modalizadores discursivos

Abstract

This research realizes an investigation about the requirement genre taking into account that this is one of the documents frequently used in the day-to-day of organizations. Whereas there are few studies that deal with argumentativity in the requirement genre, our goal is to analyze the linguistic-discursive behavior of the modalizers present in requirement genre, checking how these are constituted in a semantic-argumentative characteristic of the genre. The hypothesis which guides this work is that the volitional deontic modalization is a phenomenon common to all requirements. Our research has a qualitative / descriptive feature, however, we quantified the occurrences of the modalizers in the present study about the genre. The corpus is consisted of 30 requirements collected in the World Wide Web, all of public institutions. We used requirements which belong to three discursive domains: administrative, judicial, and legislative, 10 of each. The research has as theoretical reference Argumentation Theory, developed by Ducrot and collaborators (1988), and the studies about modalization realized by Castilho and Castilho (1993), Neves (2010), Cervoni (1989), Nascimento and Silva (2012), among others. The modalization term, according to Castilho and Castilho (1993), express a speaker’s judgment before a statement. The authors classify the modalitation into three types: Epistemic, deontic and affective. However, for our work we adopt the classification of Nascimento and Silva (2012), whereby the modalizers were classified into four types: epistemic, deontic, evaluative and delimiters. We also work on the notion of discursive genres of Bakhtin (2000) and the notion of discursive domain of Marcuschi (2008). The analysis showed that the volitional deontic modalization is the main semantic-argumentative characteristic of the requirement genre, thus becoming a very effective strategy, in the argumentative point of view to the success of the request in that genre. We also note that among the effects of meaning caused by the modalizers, the main are engagement strategies, distancing and persuasion. We could observe the engagement strategies through asseveratives modalizers, the distancing strategies, through quasi-asseveratives, and the persuasion strategies, through the evaluation.