Tweet: reelaboração de gêneros em 140 caracteres

Abstract

This thesis discusses the process of genre re-elaboration in the formation of Twitter posts. We therefore investigated how the functioning scheme and the value dynamics of this social network inspire the manipulation of different genre patterns that, when migrating to the interior, are submitted to its users’ work. We conduct our discussion in the light of social network analysis practiced by Recuero (2009; 2010), the epistemological reflections on the discourse genre nature formulated by Bakhtin ([1979] 2011), the communicative purpose concept coined and made neat by Swales (1990; 2004), Askhave and Swales (2001) and Bhatia (1993; 2001) and the re-elaboration concept, as been updated since Araújo (2006) until Zavam (2009) and Costa (2010). Supported by this theoretical and methodological basis, we undertook an analysis of 195 posts and 45 questionnaires answered by Twitter users. At first, from the post propagation indexes, we observed how the social network functioning dynamics influences the diffusion and the genre arrays sedimentation formed by patterns and distinct genres. In a second step, we turned to the tweet form, detecting that strategies were used by the users in order to intervene in the genres when elaborating their tweets. Finally, we investigated, in the corpus examples and with the users questioned, that communicative purposes were served by the posts resulting from this work. The results showed that, within Twitter, there is a peculiar functioning dynamics, which is reflected in the language actions of the actors of this social network whom, motivated by the desire to put themselves in evidence and broaden their connections, mobilize and manipulate distinct genre patterns by using specific strategies. The genre arrangements generated from this scheme have distinctive communicative purposes, at the service of the social network itself. We believe that the sum of these factors: peculiar enunciative demand, distinct genre pattern mobilization and communicative purpose modification, is set as a genre re-elaboration constant process, whose products are consumed and propagated within the social network, feeding it back.