Text genre and time discursive construction

Abstract

This paper adopts a text and discourse linguistics framework. We will assume discourses (or discourse types) represent an intermediate organizational level between text genre and the specific linguistic devices in use (Bronckart, 1997, 2008). Discourse types play a key role in language activity, as they allow the transition between individual and collective representations, and they involve temporal and agentive relationships. In our research, we focus the linguistic devices associated with temporal relationship, in order to distinguish between expositive and narrative discourses and to verify our main research issue: to understand how social activity and text genre can constrain the presence of different discourse types and to describe what function can assume the same discourse type in different texts (of different genres). To obtain evidence to address these questions, we analyze texts produced in literary, familiar and scientific activities.