A estrutura organizacional da Sentença Judicial: uma abordagem à luz da Teoria da Estrutura Retórica

Abstract

This dissertation presents a study on the judicial sentence genre through a functionalist perspective of language, analyzing, under the framework of the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), the textual organization of this genre from the rhetorical relations that emerge between textual portions, and verifying how these relations contributed to the organization and to the subsequent comprehension of the organizational structure of the genre under analysis. The hypothesis established in this work is that the judicial sentence is a genre that favors the occurrence, on a regular basis, of the rhetorical relations of enablement, elaboration, evidence, list and preparation, and this regular pattern contributes to the reader's understanding of the paths taken by the judge to arrive at the decision of the sentence. To this end, we carried out a qualitative analysis of five read and evaluated court sentences, judged between 2013 and 2019, which are available on the website of the Court of Justice of Minas Gerais, and which fit two criteria: that the sentences should have the compositional structure proposed by the Civil Procedure Core; and that they should be claims for moral damages. Thus, regarding the frequency of rhetorical relations in the macrostructure of the corpus, it must be noted that the relation of preparation occurred fifteen times, corresponding to 75% of the total of relations; on the other hand, the relation of enablement occurred five times, corresponding to 25% of the total. Regarding the frequency of rhetorical relations in the microstructure of the Ratio Decidendi and the Conclusion of the corpus, ten nucleus-satellite relations were found in the analysis, as follows: addition, antithesis, evidence, background, justification, preparation, circumstance, conclusion, elaboration, and explanation; three multinuclear relations were found: contrast, list, and sequence. The results of the analysis indicated the possibility of identifying the following characteristics of the judicial sentence genre: this is the formal result of a process, and, for it to begin, some basic conditions are necessary, such as the parties involved in the dispute, the object of the action and the legal basis of the request; it was also observed that, even in the sentences whose report was dismissed or in those that did not present an identification via the titles of the formal parts that compose them, it is possible to identify the subjects referring to each one of these parts; finally, both in the analysis of the discursive topics and in the analysis of the microstructure of the Ratio Decidendi, there was a higher incidence of the relation of preparation, which shows, again, that we are dealing with an intrinsic organization of the judicial sentence genre.