Textos forenses: um estudo de seus gêneros textuais e sua relevância para o gênero sentença

Abstract

This work aims the investigation of the several criminal suit court record text categories: types, genres and species (according to TRAVAGLIA, [2003]/2007) which are used in our society in the criminal court. Thus, it is necessary to contemplate the idea that the number of texts used in a criminal process is great and that each epoch lives a set of rules that are of its own, i.e, they do not abandon the past, they do not break up with the traditions, although they shape or discipline the human facts according to the demands of the moment. Therefore, our intention is to verify the existence of these several categories of texts, characterize them linguistically and verify in the genre sentence the reflexes, by means of linguistic marks, of those text genres which were used in criminal processes and motivated the judge to make up his decision and declare his sentence . This study was done according to the theoretical bases of the Text Linguistics and the reflections of the several text categories present in our daily routine at the criminal court, about which, lawyers manuals refer to, sometimes as criminal court documents, process or simply nominate them according to the legal terminology proposed in our criminal legal texts, which many times can lead to misunderstandings once they do not have the rigor of the juridical terminology, once the rigor of the law science depends substantially on the language which can not nominate different institutes with the same name neither can it nominate the same institutes with different names. Nevertheless, the legislator did not hold on any criteria and, being divorced of any scientific or systematic orientation, has opted for each law the empiric solutions. So, for the analyses of our text categories we have developed a qualitative study with an analytic-descriptive methodology that uses scraps of the collected corpus from 10 (ten) criminal processes collected for this investigation with the scope of analyzing and characterizing each of them with special attention to the sentence by means of the linguistic materiality of this corpus which is left behind as a clue to the motivation of the judge. Such analyses and characterizations are also based on the foundations of the Theory of the Speech Acts (AUSTIN, 1962), The Communicative Action Theory (HABERMAS, 1983, 2003), the theories about the argumentation, as well as the postulate of Discourse Communities (SWALES, 1990).