Uma abordagem funcionalista das relações retóricas em anúncios publicitários

Abstract

This thesis investigates the rhetoric relations materialized in the publicity ad genre in everyday Brazilian Portuguese. The ads were selected from the press in various kinds of support. First, a brief review of the approaches to the articulation of clauses is carried out along the lines of Traditional Grammar and Functional-systemic Grammar as in Halliday (2004 [1985]). Anchored in the functionalist premise that linguistic forms are not arbitrary in relation to their meaning and function, and following a qualitative-interpretive approach, the analysis in this study is based on the functionalist theoretical constructs of the West coast US, especially on the Rhetorical Structure Theory RST , as postulated by Mann and Thompson (1983), Matthiessen and Thompson (1988), Mann (2005), among others. The hypothesis that guides this study is that the kind of rhetoric relations, or coherence relations, or relational propositions that emerge between textual spams, configured or not as clauses, is a consequence of the textual genre and of the specificity of the media support conveying it. Within the scope of macro and micro structures, the analysis points to a variety of rhetoric relations, which constitute argumentation and persuasion strategies in this genre. By restricting to the verbal elements in the text materiality, the rhetoric organization of a corpus of written data, consisting of thirty publicity ads, was analyzed. The implicit and explicit relations that emerge between the parts of the texts were identified and described. The results reveal that nucleus-satellite relations of ELABORATION, PREPARATION and CONDITION occur more often. This confirms the hypothesis of the interference of genre in the rhetoric organization of publicity ads. As for the support, the results point to a diverse and differentiated materialization of rhetoric relations, as well as a much varied employment of persuasion strategies. Among these are verbal forms in the imperative, simple present and simple past, besides auxiliary and modal verbs, recurrent use of deictic you and clauses marked by the connector and.