Igreja Presbiteriana do Brasil: tipificação, gêneros e identidade de uma comunidade discursiva religiosa

Abstract

This work addresses textual genres found in Brazil´s Presbyterian Church discursive community, hereinafter BPC, emphasizing how these genres work in the service of building an identity for such community. In order to do so we relied on theoretical ballast that articulates: concepts and criteria for the typological characterization of texts; the concept of discursive community bonded to typification, systems of activities, systems of genres, classification systems, representation systems and marking differences. Based on five parameters (the conditions of production, the thematic content, the goal and the functions, the compositional structure and the characteristics of the linguistic surface), we sought to accomplish a characterization and analysis of genres found in the community and classified partially as related to identity. The genres were also considered as acting in the community´s identity in two ways: the ones that belong to the community and the ones that acted in the construction of their way of thinking and existing. Twenty-seven genres from the Brazilian Presbyterian Church (BPC) were raised. Twenty of them played a role on the identity settling of BPC either because they were exclusive from the community (two of them), either because they presented, although shared by other Christian or non Christian religious communities, specific characteristics from BPC (eighteen of them). The genres that were found were organized in three specific worlds: the administrative world, the world of ritual and the social world. We have also often ascertained that these genres were influenced by some previous texts and genres (The Bible, Confessions of Faith, Westminster´s Larger and Shorter Catechisms), created outside the community, but circulating around it and that compose what we call supra-world.