The “just-so story” is a narrative

appraisal analysis in a social semiotic approach to genre

Abstract

This study aims at identifying a text recognized in the Brazilian culture as a “just-so story”, published on a website for didactic support to Brazilian Portuguese language teachers, as a genre. The analysis stems from one of the social semiotic approaches of genre of Systemic-Functional Linguistics. The theoretical and methodological frameworks of Martin and Rose (2007, 2008) and Martin and White (2005) were used. In order to identify the genre of the analyzed text, the first procedure was segmenting the just-so story. The second procedure was classifying its evaluative resources, based on the Appraisal System The third procedure was identifying patterns of configurations of evaluative resources for each stage of the genre. The results show that the patterns of configuration of evaluative resources of the just-so story are compatible with the patterns defined by Martin and Rose (2008) as characteristic of narratives, a genre that belongs to the “family” of stories.