A modalização discursiva como índice de argumentatividade no gênero discursivo memorial

Abstract

The memorial discourse genre is used in the academic sphere by students and teachers to describe memories, experiences, express emotions, desires, frustrations, and reflections on their academic life, as well as to present the courses taken, the academic training process, and the personal development process. In this research, our general objective was to analyze the most recurrent modalizers in the memorial discourse genre, and our specific objectives were: to map the different types of modalizers in the memorial discourse genre; to describe the argumentative functioning of the different types of modalizers; to verify the effects of meaning generated by the modalizers in the aforementioned genre; and to identify which modalizers constitute elements specific to the linguistic style of the genre. The investigation is theoretically based on the Theory of Argumentation in Language, by Ducrot and collaborators (1988), according to which language is, by nature, argumentative. In addition to this theoretical perspective, studies on discursive modalization, proposed by Castilho and Castilho (2002), Neves (2011) and Nascimento e Silva (2012), are used in order to present how the speaker leaves marks of his subjectivity, through different discursive modalizers. Regarding the discussion of discursive genres, the studies of Bakhtin (2011 [1979]) were used, which considers genre from a socio-interactionist perspective. The corpus is composed of 6 (six) memorials produced by professors at the Federal University of Paraíba, which were submitted to the progression evaluation panel for full professor at the institution. This research is qualitative in nature, descriptive and interpretive in nature. The analyzes carried out demonstrate that different types of modalizers were used to construct the genre, namely: epistemic, deontic, evaluative and delimiting; however, the delimiting and evaluative modalization are characteristics of the verbal style itself, due not only to its recurrence in the genre under study, but also to its relationship with the functionality of the genre itself, which reports memories highlighting the speaker's points of view. on the content of what is said, also establishing limits (whether academic or personal in nature) within which the stated content must be considered.