Topic unicity and intertopic complexity in reader’s letters published in the newspaper Diário da Região in the decade of 2020

Abstract

This paper is developed within the so-called diachronic approach to texts, a new theoretical framework that addresses the diachronic study of textual processes and which is based on the assumption that the diachrony of these processes is part of the history of genres. Particularly, the article contributes to the investigation of a hypothesis according to which the diachrony of a textual process in a genre is affected by the use of the genre in different communicative domains. In this context, the purpose of this paper is to describe the topic organization of reader’s letters published in the 2020s in the newspaper Diário da Região, by taking it as a specific communicative domain in which reader’s letters are used. The corpus is composed by 51 letters, selected from the digital collection of this newspaper, and the analysis is based on the analytical category of discourse topic (Jubran, 2006a; 2006b). The discussion focusses on two possible manifestations of topic organization — topic unicity and intertopic complexity — and it demonstrates that most of the letters present unicity while a smaller, but significant group presents complexity. The paper also compares these results with previous studies, and the comparison suggests the validity of that hypothesis.