Curricular components of graduate courses in Tourism: a syntactic-semantic reading in dialogic relationship between knowledge areas

Abstract

Among the designations of curricular components (subjects) of graduate courses in Tourism, there are some in which Tourism and other areas of knowledge make up a syntagma whose terms are linked by elements such as: “of”, “in the”, “in”, “and”, as well as “applied to”. Therefore, the objective here, based on a syntactic-semantic analysis of such designations, is to deduce dialogue configuration indexing elements that hold among them. Following methodological procedures of cut-off delimitation, a piece of research was carried out in which 74 curricula constituted by 139 subjects  were analyzed, assuming that: 1) the Course Pedagogical Project (CPP) document within which the curricular structure constitutes the materialization of the intangible dimension of the curriculum and, hence, the subjects designations should be ringed together with the intricate guiding presuppositions underlying the PPC; 2) language, not being neutral, carries marks of voices of the subjects involved in the enunciation (enunciator and enunciatee), so that such designations imply meanings that go beyond the mere formal register.  Different percentage numbers of the incidence of the above mentioned construção sintáticas were found, with a predominance (%) of “area X applied to Tourism”. In that syntactic formulation there is a one-way transitivity, giving Tourism a connotation of object of the application in determined area, lacking relational symmetry in the dialogue between them. Results bring to reflection the pertinence of the prefix “inter”, in the perspective of interdisciplinarity, both with reference to the nature of Tourism and to what the National Curricular Guidelines of Tourism courses state about interdisciplinarity. The option for the syntactic-semantic reading as an analysis tool, originated from Text Linguistics competences as well as from enunciative linguistics, and made it possible to expand the result interpretations, contributing to the establishment, from an interdisciplinary view, of other/new conceptual connections.