SOCIAL AND DISCOURSIVE PRACTICE: AN INVESTIGATION OF EDITORIALS IN SECRETARIA EXECUTIVA AND MULHER EXECUTIVA MAGAZINES

Abstract

In this article I report the data analysis and results in terms of social and discursive practice based on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and gender studies. The purpose is to discuss what is happening in the immediate social context in which my corpus, six editorials of a Brazilian magazine dedicated to executive secretaries - Secretária Executiva and Mulher Executiva, is inserted and how that environment affects women’s identity. The main objective was to answer what the editorials, the interviews and the news report reveal about the social context. Therefore, I present the results of the context of situation analysis with its three variables; field, tenor and mode. For the field variable, first I report some characteristics of production and distribution and types of articles found in the magazine to point out what is going on in that context. Second, the group of students’ and teachers’ opinions, and the linguistic features of the editorials represent the variable tenor, answering who interacts with whom and the way the interaction is realized in that context. Third, I discuss the variable, mode, showing the role of language. Finally, I present the final discussions.