Investigating how the theme is constituted in the genre known as online comment

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating how the theme is constituted in the genre known as online comment, considering Bakhtin’s idea (2010 [1929 -1930]) which assures that the theme is the ideologized content comprehending both verbal and non-verbal material, built up socially and historically, in a certain culture, involving interlocutors in actual situations. The corpus for analysis comprehends some comments online displayed on the website of Meio Norte channel (Teresina – PI) and on the website of the TV News Hoje, of national circulation, referring to three different social facts which are also potentially controversy generators. The research has shown that the wish for justice is one of the most recurrent themes on online comments and that the theme of the genre “online comment” is characterized, simultaneously, by tipification and innovation, inasmuch as although it shows recurrent features, in other words, common traces, it also goes through innovation (update) according to the social happenings and to the different enunciating situations.