The penal process as a genre system

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to describe the constitution of a penal process from the perspective of language as a social practice, with emphasis on the field of the social practices of/at work. The description is based on the concepts of genre, genre sets, genre systems and activity systems, discussed by Bazerman (2004). The analysis includes the conventions for legal procedures in the Brazilian context, found in the legislation, and a corpus of reference, i.e., the complete records of a penal process from the First Criminal Court of Santa Maria-RS. We investigated the legal subjects and their roles in the genres they participate of, with emphasis on the activities performed through written texts. Results indicate that the complex genre system which constitutes the records of a penal process functions as one of the mechanisms that maintain the highly specialized character of the activities conducted by members of the legal establishment.