The Memory of Rhetorical Tradition: Exploring Reformulation in Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Objective: This article aims to present discursive reformulation and demonstrate its methodological relevance in relation to specific materials and research questions in Discourse Analysis.

Originality/Contribution: The topic has traversed the author's research trajectory, and the types and scope of the field are generally illustrated through works she has conducted at different times, using corpora from various domains. Additionally, the pedagogical weight of reformulation in the rhetorical tradition and its impact on writing instruction are highlighted. In an era where Artificial Intelligence is developing automatic text generation from extensive databases or from single to multiple texts given as input for tasks such as translation, glossing, correction, or adaptation to different audiences, it becomes relevant to showcase the significance of reformulation and the analyst's operational methods.

Conclusion: The examples demonstrate how, by highlighting operations on the original texts, regularities can be detected. From these regularities, the analyst infers the representations that guide the production of the new text. From a glottopolitical perspective, which is concerned with the semiotic dimension of social processes as they are presented in the political sphere, encompassing both social discourses and language policies and interventions in educational contexts, the methodological entry through reformulation operations provides data that, in interpretation, are articulated with the conditions of discourse production.