Chat na web: um estudo de gênero hipertextual

Abstract

This research investigates the hypotheses that the chat is a class of the discourse formed by the transformation of the daily dialogue for the Web and that an specific group of internauts is a discoursing community. The theoretical bases used for checking these hypotheses are the enunciative theory of Bakhtin (1981; 1997) and the concept of discoursing community of Swales (1990; 1992). The corpus is the result of a research of ethnographic character, conducted in a specific chat room. Firstly, we focussed on the application of the criteria of Swales’ discoursing community to the Tananans group. This is a group of virtual friends who interact with each other by chatting. Next, we observed the overlap of semiotical elements, which gives to the chat characteristics of the domain in which the event occurs, namely the Web. The analysis shows that, although the communicative practice of the Tananans has begun from the interactions through chatting, this practice expands towards other mechanisms and classes developed by the group, allowing the validation of the hypothesis that this group is a discoursing community in the sense attributed by Swales. Furthermore, we verified that chat is the main class which gives verbal support to the communication among the internauts. Such a class is characterized by an intense game of semioses that simulate gestures, sounds and expressions which are proper to the oral interaction. The analysis makes us conclude that the intersemiosis sound-image- writing reveals itself as a feature of the transformation of the daily dialogue for the Web, since it stops the paralinguistical gaps.