ARGUMENTA O E INTERA O: OS MODALIZADORES NA CARTA OFICIAL

This article aims to describe how de phenomenon of modalization works in the discourse genre called official letter. The theoretical reference of this work is The Modalization Theory developed by Castilho & Castilho (1993), Koch (2000), Neves (2002) and Nascimento (2005). This theory explains how a locutor prints some evaluation and also indicates how his text has to be read, showing his intentions and attitudes. The corpus of this investigation is 20 official letters from different Brazilian public institutions such as schools, universities, justice departments etc. In such letters, it has been detected three different kinds of modalization (epistemic, deontic,evaluative). This proves our hypothesis that argumentation in this discourse genre is processed, mainly, through modalization. The modalizers inside this genre have been used to show locutor’spoints of view, but also as a strategy which is used for the locutor to interact with his interlocutor, in order to establish how the interlocutor may react.