HOW PHD STUDENTS IN LINGUISTICS CONSTRUCT THE SECTION “IDENTIFICATION OF THE RESEARCH PROBLEM”

Abstract

This research aims to analyze the section “Identification of the Research Problem” of the research projects of PhD students in Linguistics, describing the recurrent rhetorical steps used by the producers of the genre. Our corpus is composed of twelve research projects submitted and approved in the doctoral selection (for admission in 2019) of the Postgraduate Program in Letters of the Federal University of Piauí. This study is based on the socio-rhetorical approach to genres by Swales (1990), Miller (2012) and Bazerman (2005). For the analysis of the corpus, we first performed a full reading of the research projects so that we could understand what each project was about. Then, we dedicate ourselves particularly to reading the section “Identification of the research problem” in order to, from that, identify the rhetorical steps, always observing the linguistic clues that led to its realization. From the analysis, we showed the recurrence of fifteen rhetorical steps. The analyzed section proved to be quite heterogeneous, serving as a “gateway”, presenting strategies of theoretical, methodological and empirical aspects. Thus, researchers seem to appropriate the available theoretical knowledge and articulate it with their experiences in order to present a problem.

Keywords: Research project. Academic genres. Genre analysis.