Discourse and genre

What is a genre? A staged, goal-oriented, purposeful activity in which speakers engage as members of our culture (Martin, 1984: 25)

What is a genre? A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale (i.e. social purpose) for the genre. This (social purpose) shapes the schematic (discourse) structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style (Swales 1980: 58).

What is a genre? Communicative purpose is both a privileged criterion (that is, the criterion that matters the most) and one that operates to keep the scope of a genre as here conceived narrowly focused on comparable rhetorical action (i.e. what it is doing). In addition to purpose, exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style, content and intended audience (Swales 1980: 58).

What is a genre? If all high probability expectations (that is, more or less not either/or) are realized, the exemplar will be viewed as prototypical by the parent discourse community. The genre names inherited and produced by discourse communities and imported by others constitute valuable ethnographic communication, but typically need further validation (Swales, 1990: 58).

Practicing a genre is almost like playing a game, with its own rules and conventions. Established genre participants, both writers and readers, are like skilled players, who succeed by their manipulation and exploitation of, rather than a strict compliance with, the rules of the game It is not simply a matter of learning the language, or even learning the rules of the game, it is more like acquiring the rules of the game in order to be able to exploit and manipulate them to fulfill professional and disciplinary purposes (Bhatia, 1998: 25-26)

Assigning a text to a genre category Customer: What kind of book would you say this is? Where would you put it on your bookshelves? Sales assistant: Well.. I suppose you’d call it a biography because it’s got some of her earlier life in it. It’s not a memoir... I don’t know... It’s not very interesting. She got someone else to help her write it. It should have been in the first person, I only read about half of it... I don’t know... Maybe it’s an expose …

Relationships between genres

Written genres across cultures

Spoken genres across cultures

Summary Genres are activities that people engage in through the use of language Letters to the editor and academic essays are examples of written genres Academic lectures and casual conversations are examples of spoken genres

Summary Genres may be spoken or written in typical, and sometimes conventional, ways Genres often have a common function and purpose (or set of functions and purposes) There may be certain contexts in which a genre typically occurs

Summary A text may have the same structure as other texts yet be an instance of a very different genre A text may be a mix of different genres Genres change through time We draw on our previous experiences with a genre to produce, understand and interpret new examples of a genre Genre is not always a clear-cut category