Retextualização do gênero gráfico: uma análise à luz da Teoria da Estrutura Retórica

Abstract

This thesis presents a study which investigates the occurrence of rhetorical relations emerging among text spans, in order to identify the prototypicality of the charts genre. The theoretical framework is supported by diverse currents. First of all, by functionalist studies, specifically,the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), proposed by Mann and Thompson (1988). The RST focuses on coherence and aims at describing text organization, through the identification of the rhetorical relations which emerge among text spans. The analyst identifies the rhetoricalrelations guided by the criterion of plausibility, so that a function is attributed to each text span, according to what he or she judges to be most plausible. Text Linguistics also guides this work, specifically regarding the process of textuality and retextualization, according to Dell'Isola (2007) and Marcuschi (1998). The retextualization process was privileged in this research as an aid to identify the recurrence of rhetorical relations, both in the charts as in the retextualizations, and the occurrence of operations, as per Marcuschi (2007). Due to the complex organization of charts, we have selected, within Multimodality, the semiotic resources proposed by Kress and van Leeuwen (1998), seeking an interface with the Rhetorical Structure Theory. However, the semantic information contained in the text was prioritized. It was identified through the Given/New structure, whose distribution interferes with the construction of meaning. The present work is based on the hypothesis that the process of retextualization favors the understanding of the charts genre, since it enables student's understanding of the genre and production of a coherent text. Besides that, according to preliminary analysis, it was noted that charts favor the emergence of rhetorical relations of eleboration, list and sequence, which characterize the prototypicality of the genre. For this research, a corpus composed of nine charts, denominated source-text, was compiled. It included different forms of representation, that is, bar, line, and pyramid charts, selected from collections of textbooks from different areas of knowledge, school tests and the Brazilian national standardized test (ENEM), with diverse images, covering a variety of topics, such as demographics and reading. The corpus also included 23 retextualized texts considered, in thisthesis, as target-text. It was found, in the analysis of the charts and retextualizations, that the charts present a recurrence of specific rhetorical relations, which characterize the prototypical organization of this text genre.