Notes on friendship: a study on interactional involvement in personal letters

Abstract

The main focus of this work is the description and analysis of aspects of verbal interaction in personal letters, the central corpus of the investigation consisting of correspondencebetween Mário de Andrade and Luís Câmara Cascudo. It begins with a discussion of genre, as an empirical entity, followed by reflections on the personal letter as a genre realized in human interactions. In this context, among the various identifiable goals for writing letters, the possibility of the interlocutors maintaining friendship is salient, even when parties are at great distances from one another, measured by the involvement installed between them. Thus, having interactive postulados as a base, this research proposes an interpretative and inductive analysis, of linguistic and discursive phenomenon evidenced in the personal letters selected.