O gênero emergente webcomics.

With the advancement of technology, we witness new textual genres emerging. Some of these are variations of already known textual genres, but which take on new characteristics based on new technologies, digital tools and semiosis. This is the case with webcomics, a variation on the comic books from the past. The growth in demand for the genre has strong roots in the popularity of comic books and their use on comic publishing websites and platforms (EISNER, 1995). The present article aims to study this emerging genre and determine its compositional characteristics. To this end, we use the theoretical assumptions of gender studies (MARTIN, 1992; HALLIDAY and HASAN, 1989) and Internet Linguistics (CRYSTAL, 2005) for specific studies on webcomics and aspects of e-discourse. Regarding the genre and its elements, we apply the concepts of the Generic Structure Potential (GSP) which describes linguistic patterns that occur in the genre by determining variables of mandatory, optional, sequential, and recursive elements. The study corpus consists of 10 (ten) texts extracted from the public online webtoon database. The results of the study indicated consistent patterns of mandatory, optional, sequential, and recursive elements in the corpus, giving the genre well-established compositional patterns. Furthermore, ediscourse aspects were also identified, such as abbreviations and acronyms; emoticons, emojis and other similar resources, new spellings and writings, hypertextuality, interactivity (comments, reader suggestions, multiple authorship, etc.), anonymity and pseudonymity and, finally, textual fragmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]