Twitter under the perspective of action text meaning in the Critical Discourse Analysis

Abstract

The aim of this study is to apply some analytical categories of the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in order to contribute to the studies, still incomplete, about the Twitter social network, as well as seek for characteristics that could constitute the social network as a new digital genre. Thus, the choice of CDA categories seem relevant since there was a concern in adjusting the theoretical issues to a school of studies on the genres that were more compliant and conversant with the CDA, which is the School of Sydney, based on systemicfunctional view of language. Ninety-one tweets were selected for analysis based on a topic that has caused controversy not only on Twitter, but in other media, on the aggression of a teacher by a student in a private school in Rio Grande do Sul. Preliminarily, it concludes that Twitter reveals as a hybrid genre that has incorporated in this particular case, characteristics of genres such as news and advertising. In addition to characteristics of expressions of opinions, which can claim a widespread ideological reproduction of values in these primary genres.