THE HISTORY OF A CRIME: THE NARRATIVE SEQUENCE IN TESTIMONIAL RECORDS
Discourse Textual Analysis. Narrative textual sequence. Testimonial record. Legal genre.
In the present work, we aim to analyze how the narrative sequences occur within the genre testimony record, procedural component that integrates the police investigation whilst being intended for the witness testimony. Our theoretical groundings are based on the general propositions of the Text Linguistics with authors as Koch (1997; 1999; 2002; 2008; 2009), Koch e Elias (2012; 2013) and Marcuschi (2008; 2012), and, more specifically, on the Discourse Textual Analysis with Adam (2011) regarding the text plan and narrative sequence studies. In relation to the legal discourse, we use Pelágio (2002), Gomes (2011), Nucci (2014) and França (2015).The methodology consists of a documental research, of qualitative and descriptive nature, as well as guided by the inductive and deductive reasoning. The corpus is represented by three testimonial records obtained from a Women’s Police Station (Delegacia Especializada em Atendimento à Mulher – DEAM), located at Natal, Rio Grande do Norte. Results indicate that the testimony provided by the witness is predominantly composed by several minor narratives – the so-called embedded narratives, which act upon the text due to a global-level narrative. The results also indicate that the narrative sequences play an important role in the testimonial record genre, since they function as the main mechanism for the organization and arrangement of the witness testimony.