XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

Reflexivity and difference in the academic-scientific writing: production and analysis of data

• In Event: Perspectives on academic writing in Brazilian universities: a socio-discursive approach

Abstract

The theme of this work is the reflexivity in the academic-scientific writing, seen from a discursive perspective in Applied Linguistics. I focus on the reflexivity, conceived as a process of returning to the text itself when a difference is activated between a formulation and another in the text, that is, in the pragmatic level of language. Opposing to reflexivity seen as a property of the linguistic system (which always resolves itself as the same in language), I dedicate my attention to the reflexivity in the pragmatic level in which the novelty of a new formulation always resolves itself as difference from a common producer of difference – a notion which substitutes the common in the homogeneity of the language by the common in the heterogeneity in the pragmatic level of language. The analyzed written compositions were obtained from a graduate discipline of a Brazilian public university. The goal is to delineate this common producer of difference theoretically in a way that it is possible to distinguish it from the idea of correlation between the linguistic and active social factors (as gender, ethnicity, color, social class, education etc.) in the relationship between language and society. Thus, when searching for marks of reflexivity in language, I focus on: (a) the creation of the research material based on the notion of archive (GUILHAUMOU, MALDIDIER; ROBIN, 2016) and (b) the consideration that the analyzed texts inscribe (and not only reflect) the archive itself, which constitutes, in its double face, the research data (on the researcher’s desk) and the fact of life (in society and history), the archive being, therefore, on the basis of the production of research data.

Author

• Manoel L G Correa, University of Sao Paulo