Modalizadores no gênero ofício: uma descrição semântico-argumentativa

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to describe through a semantic-argumentative perspective the textual/discursive genre named official letter. The hypothesis investigated is that argumentativity occurs in official letter genre mostly through the use of modals. The corpus consists of 100 official letters received by a university between the years of 2008 and 2009. Two theories were used as support for this descriptive investigation: the Theory of Language Argumentation and the Theory of Modalization. According to the first, language itself has elements that prove the presence of argumentativity. The Theory of Modalization shows how it is possible to perceive the locutor‟s position, intentions and judgments, therefore the text direction. It was found that the modalization that shows the locutor´s evaluation and the deontic and epistemic modals are the most frequently used. This shows the locutor´s strong involvement with the propositional content. There were also found cases of co-occurences. The results proved the hypothesis and indicate the need of more studies concerning the official letter genre so that other aspects than the formal ones will be taken into consideration for its production/reception.