This piece of research aimed at analysing 104 direct sale letters (33.633 words) in Brazilian Portuguese. The corpus was explored in order to investigate the process patterns (Halliday, 1994, 1985) in the System of Transitivity (Experiential Metafunction) and its distribution over the different moves and steps (Swales, 1990). Corpus Linguistics was the main methodological tool; two software for lexical analysis (Manson, 1999; Scott, 1999) and a tagging system were used. Results show that the move responsible for the communicative purpose of the letters is the one which carries the highest number of processes and the most complex system of choices.
Systemic-Functional Grammar; System of Transitivity; Field Analysis