The attribution of genre tags: the graffiti case

In the study of genres (Adam & Heidmann 2007, 9), generic categorisation and the criteria that support it are unavoidable questions. In the present paper – having as a starting point the need to elicit the generic designation of texts that express subjectivity, which are written on exterior walls and in other public environments – we propose the genre tag of personal graffiti. In order to support this methodological proposal, we follow the theoretical principles of the Sociodiscursive Interactionism framework (SDI) (Bronckart [1997] 1999, 2010, 2008), and we have made a qualitative survey of the social activities and socio-subjective parameters underlying the conditions of production of 20 European Portuguese texts. From this survey, we can see that the social framework of interaction, the social roles and the purposes of personal graffiti texts are different from those found in political graffiti texts. Besides this, we have conducted a comparative analysis of genre markers (Miranda 2010), to account for the characteristics that identify and differentiate texts. Based on this analysis, we can observe that the text plan presents voices and topics of personal graffiti texts are distinct from those of political graffiti texts. The different features of texts allows to delimit the genre and support the generic designation adopted.