The rhetorical relations from hyperlinks in digital scientific popularization texts and the mediatic staging

Abstract

This paper presents results from a quantitative research that studied hypertextual scientific popularization texts published in Brazilian press. We start from the hyperlink and investigate the rhetorical relation that emerges between the text of origin and the texts of destination (verbal or non-verbal) that the producer leads the readers to, directing them to a possible reading route. We assume the hypothesis that the discursive genre regulates the rhetorical relations that emerge from the hyperlinks as well as the mediatic staging of scientific popularization performed by the magazines. The corpus is composed of 150 scientific popularization texts, 50 from each magazine: Superinteressante, Galileu and Ciência Hoje. For the purposes of the investigation, we are based on the Semiolinguistic Theory of Discourse and in the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). The first one provided us with principles for thinking of discursive restrictions of science mediatization; the second one, the foundation for identifying the rhetorical relation that emerges from the hyperlink structure. The results show the recurrence of a limited number of rhetorical relations and a percentage variation in the relations occurrence among the magazines, pointing to an influence from the discursive genre and the mediatic staging that each publication proposes.

Keywords

• hiperligação, notícia digital, divulgação científica, relação retórica, encenação midiática.