Os chats: uma constelação de gêneros na internet

Abstract

In the present research my objective was to create a concept to the phenomenon of the constellation of genres. Thus, to define that category, about which I developed my Thesis, the theoretical and philosophical formularizations of Bakhtin relative to the uses of the language were my support. The text which relates this research is organized in two great parts. In the first one, I present my theoretical and methodological construction for the study of the constellations of genres, bringing as proposal the choice of the strongest characteristic of the communication sphere where the grouping of genres is, the observation of the formative process of those genres and the identification of the social functions that they realize. In the second part, I present the chats like an example of constellation of genres and I illustrate my theoretical and methodological construction through of seven different types of chats, focusing the hypertextuality, the transmutation of genres and the communicative purpose as the operational categories to the analysis. In this research, I tried give an ethnographic character through an intense exercise of participant observation, accessing many chat rooms in the Internet during three years. For obtaining the data, besides the participant observation, I did small interviews with some chatters by e-mail. After the triangulation of the data and its posterior analysis, I arrived to the following results: the constellation of chats assumes a hypertextual nature because such characteristic is what brings chats closer as for the aspect of their communication sphere; chats are genres that share the same formative phenomenon, in other words, everyone of them is formed by the transmutation and the reinterpretation of oral genres from various communication spheres; finally, chats become distinct of each one because they build a web of communicative purposes inside of the constellation in order to serve to several social functions.