THE SOCIO-RHETORICAL CONSTRUCTION IN THE INTRODUCTION SECTION OF APPLIED LINGUISTIC RESEARCH ARTICLES

ABSTRACT Research on Genre Analysis has been increasingly concerned with the relationship between the context of a textual genre production and the description / explanation of its rhetorical and social functions. Within the academic genre studies, the disciplinary variations show that the same textual genre can be constructed in a particular way by different disciplinary areas, reinforcing the importance of the socio-rhetorical descriptions of such genres. Based on the postulates of Swales (1990), for the analysis of textual genres, and on Hyland (2000), for an understanding of disciplinary cultures, our methodology resorted to the socio-rhetorical CARS model (SWALES, 1990) and to the works of Costa (2015) and Pacheco, Bernardino and Freitas (2018), in order to describe the Introduction section of 30 empirical research articles in the area of Applied Linguistics. The analysis of the prototypical compositional configuration of the introductions was explained according to the answers of 7 experienced members of the area to the interviews. As a result, we propose a configuration of a socio-rhetorical description that registered the occurrence of two moves (“Constructing the object of research” and “Indicating the article structure”) and four rhetorical steps: “Constructing problematization of the object through socio-historical contextualization”, “Constructing problematization of the object through discussion with previous literature”, “Introducing research purpose” and “Introducing research object”.