GENRES AND DISCOURSES Flashcards
WHAT IS A TEXT? (2)
A text is a unit of semiosis that is both grammatically cohesive and semantically coherent. It has meaning in its context and is produced to communicate;
A text represents a partiuclar genre (text type) or mix of genres.
IDENTIFYING THE GENRE OF A TEXT
Recognising its conventional format:
fulfil specific communicative purposes, with some predictable structures related to those purposes;
situated in communicative activities and social contexts;
create or foreground specific relations between participants;
“Members’ resource”: many people engage in them repeatedly, usually have names recognised by group members;
Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995: duality of structure, text producers both draw on rules but also reproduce those rules;
community ownership: a discourse community enforces genre norms;
dynamic: Emerging genres are often based on the forms and/or functions of established genres;
Fairclough 2003: any one social process may require a whole chain of genres;
Bhatia 2004: any one genre may belong to a set or ‘genre colony’ with parallel purposes.
IMPLICATIONS
Genres develop with social activities;
New genres emerge with new activities and technologies;
Participants may become aware of genre conventions only when they are violated;
Different genres may have different kinds of sanctions for not following the conventions.
CLASSES OF GENRES
Longacre, 1974
prescriptive vs non-prescriptive; chronological vs non-chronological:
instructional, persuasive, narrative, exploratory and descriptive
DISCOURSE
A discourse (count noun) is a way of representing an aspect of the world;
Discourse (mass noun) is textually mediated social action;
Stubbs, 1993: any unit of language beyond the sentence;
Focault, 1972: whole way of thinking and the social structure that goes with it, not particularly linked to language;
van Dijk, 2003: a form of knowledge and memory as expressed in language;
language use as social practice that is based on knowledge, values and beliefs
