DISCURSIVE MODALIZERS IN THE GENRE OF PEDAGOGICAL PROJECT OF A HIGHER EDUCATION COURSE

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate the argumentative and enunciative semantic functioning of the Discursive Modalization phenomenon, present in the Pedagogical Project genre of Higher Education Courses, especially undergraduate courses, from different areas of knowledge. As a theoretical framework, we adopted studies on the Theory of Discursive Genres proposed by Bakhtin (2016); the Theory of Argumentation in Language proposed by Ducrot (1987; 1988); and studies on Modalization, in which Nascimento and Silva (2012) propose a classification of discursive modalizers, namely: Epistemic, Deontic, Evaluative and Delimiting. Our corpus is formed by 06 (six) Pedagogical Projects of Courses from different areas of knowledge, namely: Human Sciences, Health Sciences, Exact Sciences and Technological Sciences. Within these areas, the PPCs of the following courses were selected: Bachelor's Degree in History, Medicine, Computer Science, Gastronomy, Data Science for Business and Materials Engineering. In these documents, we found almost all types of modalizers, with the exception of the deontic modalization of prohibition. Here, we highlight the most frequent modalizers in our corpus, namely: delimiters, evaluatives, deontic of obligation and deontic of possibility. We also found the phenomena of co-occurrence of modalizers and the recent phenomenon of a single modalizer with dual modal function.