O gênero textual piada: uma abordagem à luz da Teoria da Estrutura Retórica em interface com o modelo laboviano

Abstract

Within a discursive textual perspective, this dissertation introduces a study of written jokes with the purpose of identifying its textual organization, which, for us, confers the genre its proto-typicality. Functionalism constitutes the theoretical foundation of this study, more specifically, Mann & Thompson’s (1988) Rhetorical Structure Theory – RST. RST is a descriptive theory that focuses on coherence to investigate emergent rhetoric relations among various text spans – thus revealing textual organization. The idea units were characterized as language spurts, as postulated by Chafe (1982). The criterium of plausibility was used to identify the rhetoric relations, thus attributing a function to each text span, according to what was judged the most plausible. Textual macrostructure was prioritized. This was characterized as the global semantic structure of a text, as proposed by van Dijk (1992). Besides, the rhetoric relations that emerged between dialogic pairs in the macrostructure were also investigated. Another theoretic assumption of this study is the narrative model of Labov & Waletsky (1967), which establishes six elements for a narrative: direction, complication, assessment, resolution, summary and coda, with the last two being optional. According to the Labovian model, the analysis pointed to three constituent parts of the joke genre: direction, complication and resolution. As for the concepts of text, textuality and genre adopted in this work, fundamentals of Textual Linguistics were taken into consideration, along Bakhtin (2000), Marcuschi (2008), Koch & Vilela (2001) and Dell’Isola (2001). Such a decision is justified since jokes constitute a genre in their own right, that is, a form of communicative interaction present in every field of human activity, with socio-communicative objectives, which readily refer to textuality factors, such as coherence, intentionality, acceptability and locality. Inference is yet another aspect that was considered. According to Dell’Isolla (2001, p. 44), inference “is a mental operation, by which the reader builds new propositions from given ones.” After preliminary analyses, a hypothesis was drawn, which guided this study, that is, to verify the recurrence of background rhetoric relations, such as: preparation, circumstance, elaboration, sequence, list, and contrast; and also of the three elements of the Labovian model of narratives: direction, complication and resolution. The corpus consisted of fifty jokes with various themes, produced from the internet and from specialized public domain sites. In this study, the analysis of a representative corpus, containing 15 of those jokes, was presented. The results obtained within the interface of Rhetorical Structure Theory and the Labovian model of narratives revealed relevant punctual aspects in the emergence of rhetoric relations within and via the narrative macrostructures. This, in turn, brings new elements for the characterization of the joke genre and of its textual organization.