Ensaio e artigo: confluências e divergências entre dois gêneros na esfera acadêmica

Abstract

Producing academic genres indicates the possibility to know how to act and interact actively in the academic and scientific community. However, how to ensure the participation in the social scientific sphere without the dominion from the instruments of their participation? By this issue as a serious concern of this paper, we propose to analyze two academic genres (essay and article) in order to understand them, as they are indiscriminately taken in general. In order to describe and analyze compared genrers article and academics, with the goal to show elements that can contribute to the individualization of each, we selected 20 essays and 20 articles from online national journals whose review by Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) covers grades A and B (they were published from January 2011 until May 2013). Magazines where we collect the corpus predicted the production of both genres, sometimes provided specific instructions for the production and publication of each genre. To perform the research, we chose some important concepts to the genres studies as the precursor of Bakhtin, name we cannot forget to be mentioned, and we took as an input for the analysis some categories of textual aspects cited by Bronckart (2009) that has not developed a theory for genres analysis but of texts, deeply contributes to understand the text operation by textual functioning infrastructure, textualization mechanisms and enunciative mechanisms. Silveira s (2012) study on the textual structures of research and essay genres also provided information to understand and differentiate between the genres that constitute our corpus, as well as other studies and manuals that provide information about both genres. Thus, we elect the first and third level of textual rolling for the texts analysis because we consider, as well as the author, the deeper and most superficial level, respectively, of the text we believe that these phases are able to reveal the peculiarities we investigate now. We observed that the test demonstrated the possibility to be composed by the kind of theoretical-interactive mixed discourse, by the frequent use of affective modalizations and by a compositional structure that is generally the same of the article. By the way, this genre had a predominance of theoretical discourse and a high amount of logical modalizations. The analysis revealed that the differences found in deep level, where the type of discourse and textual sequences belong, as the most superficial level, in the enunciation mechanisms, corroborate to some essay characteristics already mentioned by Gomez-Martinez (1992), Arrigucci (1999) and Guerini (2008) concerning the greatest freedom of expression about the scientific thought, with higher subjective tenor than the article.