A responsividade ativa em cartas ao editor em newsweek

Abstract

This work of scientific investigation, which is set in the field known as Critical Discourse Analysis, aims at providing evidence of the general proposition that active responding, as defined by Mikhail Bakhtin, implies a scalar property which is due to a bigger or minor commitment of the speaker in generating his/her utterance. The major or minor intensity of the commitment mentioned above can be evaluated for what one calls “degree of active responding/responsibility”. This degree can be placed within the interval that varies from 0 to 9. “9” represents the highest degree of answering/responsibility feasibility, according to the scale referred to. The degree of answering/responsibility can be measured observing the following elements in certain utterances extracted from the corpus analysed: the nature of the letter, ideological position, reference to ideological manipulation, marks of subjectivity, presence of co-speaker, forms of intertextuality. These elements were used in categorizing the corpus of 153 letters taken from Newsweek magazine in the period between August 2011 and February 2012. The categorization was carried out with the use of the software SPSS 7.5 for Windows. In order to accomplish the investigative journey, we relied on Bakhtin (2000), Fairclough (2003), Mainguneau (1997), Thompson (2009), Palmer (1986) and Neves (2007). According to the quantitative and qualitative analysis performed, we came to the conclusion that there is a degree of active responding/responsibility in terms of this scale quoted and the categories presented here. The following categories of analysis have revealed effective influence over the degree of responding/responsibility: the nature of the letter, ideological position, reference to ideological manipulation, marks of subjectivity, presence of co-speaker. The category named forms of intertextuality has revealed a partial influence over the degree of responding/responsibility; and the categories derived from the Theory of Evaluation showed ineffective over the degree of responding/responsibility in terms of this mentioned scale.