This article focuses on discursive regularities that can generally be observed in text corpora produced in similar communication situations (medical interviews, political debates, teaching classes, etc.). One type of such regularities is related to the so-called ‘discourse genres’, considered as a set of tacit instructions broadly constraining the forms of utterances in a given discursive practice. Those regularities highlight the relatively regulated, non-random nature of most of our discursive practices and epitomize the necessary constrained creativity of meaning making in (...) discourse. In this perspective, we suggest that the concepts of Thirdness and Habit, as theorized by Charles S. Peirce, can be fruitful in describing the role and importance of such regularities in our sociodiscursive life. More specifically, we believe that discourse regularities are ideal case studies if one wishes to investigate instances of predictability in semiotic (discursive) processes. Overall, we suggest that their study can be one of many research orientations through which a prediction-based scientific conception of semiotics could be applied. (shrink)

En este artículo investigamos la incidencia de tres formatos de presentación de información multisemiótica textual en la comprensión de textos escritos a partir de un pasaje retórico del género Informe de Política Monetaria. Para ello se diseñó un experimento con tres pruebas de comprensión, cuyos textos variaban en la preponderancia multisemiótica constitutiva: texto original, texto con predominancia del sistema gráfico y texto con predominancia del sistema verbal. Estos instrumentos fueron aplicados a 151 estudiantes de una carrera universitaria en el área (...) de economía, Chile, divididos en dos grupos: estudiantes de primer año de universidad y estudiantes de tercer año. Los resultados indican, por un lado, que no existen diferencias estadísticamente significativas entre las tres condiciones de las pruebas de comprensión, en cada grupo de estudiantes. Por otro, sí se registran diferencias significativas entre los resultados de comprensión de los grupos de lectores de primer y tercer año, particularmente a favor de textos que preponderantemente privilegian un solo formato de codificación de la información ; mientras que no se distingue por nivel de inserción disciplinar en textos que exigen una lectura integrada de los códigos verbal y gráfico. Se discuten implicancias de estos resultados para la comprensión de textos especializados multisemióticos. In this paper we investigate the impact of three presentation formats of textual multisemiotic information in the comprehension of written texts from a rhetorical passage of the genre Monetary Policy Report. To do this, an experiment with three comprehension tests was designed, in which texts varied in the constituent multisemiotic preponderance: original text, text with predominance of the graphic system, and text with predominance of the verbal system. These instruments were applied to 151 students at a university program in the field of Economics in Chile. They were divided into two groups: university freshmen and university third graders. The results indicate, on the one hand, that there are no statistically significant differences between the three conditions of the comprehension tests, in each group of students. On the other hand, there are significant differences between the results of the reading comprehension tests of first and third year university students, particularly, in favor of texts predominantly of one information encoding format ; while there is no difference in terms of the disciplinary university level in texts that required an integrated reading of verbal and graphic codes. Implications of these results for the comprehension of multisemiotic specialized texts are discussed. (shrink)

The problem of political discourse genre specificity has been in the center of attention of Russian and foreign scholars, which is determined by the relevance of political discourse as a multidimensional object of study with its linguistic properties in particular. The ambiguity of principles for genre gradation of political discourse is linked to the variability of understanding genre proper. The definition of genre as goal-oriented text characteristics allows accentuating some genres of political (...) class='Hi'>discourse depending on their subject content. Herewith, its distinctive feature will be the purposeful content of the utterance. Apart from that, the proposed gradation is based on the principle of considering political activity, which determines a person’s communication in a certain situation. In accordance with the above principles, we propose to differentiate between the following genres of political discourse: information genres; persuasive; invocatory genres; apology/repentance genre. The specificity of genres of political discourse is determined by the leading intentions of the utterance as well as the type of dicteme as a text thematization unit where speech acts are realized. For each of the proposed genre groups there are dictemes of different types where the subject content of the utterance is actualized. Propaganda as spread of a certain political ideology, views and beliefs can characterize all genres of political discourse. (shrink)

As a discourse genre, statements of purpose are characterized by their occluded status in the academy and by their hybrid nature. Statements of purpose are required in applications for a place in a postgraduate course, and they are requested to obtain information about the academic and professional background and skills of each applicant. A study of the genre’s linguistic and textual features is needed in Spanish to discover and understand writers’ and readers’ perception of this genre. (...) A corpus of 50 motivation letters in Spanish is analyzed here. We study the distinguishing macro- and microtextual features of this particular genre and co-occurrences between both kinds of features. At the macrotextual level, statements of purpose display prototypical rhetorical moves, which can be classified as writers’ moves and readers’ moves. On the microtextual level, modalization resources and discourse markers are discussed. This multiple perspectives analysis of the corpus shows evidence of significant co-occurrences among modalization, discourse markers, and rhetorical moves. Writers’ ideal representations of this discourse genre, which spans the academic and professional fields, can also be deduced. (shrink)

Available corpora for Argument Mining differ along several axes, and one of the key differences is the presence (or absence) of discourse markers to signal argumentative content. Exploring effective ways to use discourse markers has received wide attention in various discourse parsing tasks, from which it is well-known that discourse markers are strong indicators of discourse relations. To improve the robustness of Argument Mining systems across different genres, we propose to automatically augment a given text (...) with discourse markers such that all relations are explicitly signaled. Our analysis unveils that popular language models taken out-of-the-box fail on this task; however, when fine-tuned on a new heterogeneous dataset that we construct (including synthetic and real examples), they perform considerably better. We demonstrate the impact of our approach on an Argument Mining downstream task, evaluated on different corpora, showing that language models can be trained to automatically fill in discourse markers across different corpora, improving the performance of a downstream model in some, but not all, cases. Our proposed approach can further be employed as an assistant tool for better discourse understanding. (shrink)

Not many studies have focused on the analysis of the rhetorical organization of a genre and the respective frequency of occurrence of moves and steps as they occur in a corpus across disciplines – particularly, with a complementary qualitative-quantitative approach. This article aims to become a step in helping to fill this gap in research on Spanish. In this way, the textbook genre, the occurrence of its rhetorical macro-moves, moves and steps and disciplinarity are the central focus of (...) this study. More specifically, in this article we seek to determine and to compare the frequency of occurrence of macro-moves, moves and steps in a corpus of 126 university textbooks across the academic discourse of four disciplines. We distinguish the major areas of knowledge as well as the specific disciplines. The main findings show there are differences between the occurrence of some discourse moves and steps across the texts of disciplines under study, which reveals a distinctive feature in the didactic component of textbooks. So we can infer that knowledge construction process through this genre is not carried out in the same way and that disciplinarity plays an important role in the diversifying organizational discourse patterns detected. (shrink)

This paper examines representations of the woman avenger in three types of medieval Chinese writings, namely, official biographies, Music Bureau poetry, and unofficial prose accounts. Such cross-genre comparisons shed light on how different narrative conventions or the lack thereof shaped the ways in which the potentially controversial stories of female vengeance were recounted. Unofficial prose accounts from the Tang period, in particular, demonstrate the development of a distinctive discourse on women and sanctioned violence that opened up fertile grounds (...) for exploring the gender tensions and ambiguities of the subject. (shrink)

Departing from the view that genres are regulative as well as constitutive of social action, this article explores the interconnectedness of genres and Discourses that transit generic boundaries. Situating the study in a local energy transition project in Denmark and exploring what happens in a series of citizen meetings without a narrowly defined agenda, I argue that the meetings may be seen as a nexus of genres constituted by a tissue of interwoven Discourses with a lifespan that extends beyond the (...) specific communicative moment. I understand a nexus of genres as a point where genres in a wider sense meet and interact. Relating the Discourses initiated by the participating citizens to the ideational, the interpersonal and the textual metafunctions in systemic functional linguistics, I analyse topics made salient by actors participating in the citizen meetings. By following these topics intertextually across generic boundaries, I identify Discourses that are mutually entangled and genres that are taken up in the process. These include anticipatory Discourse, Discourse of legitimation, Discourse of motivation, Discourse about technology and Discourse about energy saving initiatives or in other words Discourses that exceed the boundaries of the specific genre in which they are realized. (shrink)

Narratives are everywhere. We tell narratives about ourselves and we make the world meaningful through storytelling. We position others through the narratives we tell and are positioned by stories told about us. And yet, while narratives have, of course, been analysed in critical discourse studies (CDS), including in one of its most popular approaches, the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this article proposes to go a step further by systematically integrating the concept of narrative into the core of the DHA. (...) More specifically, I consider narrative from the perspective of the concept of narrative genre. That is, I propose a focus on how meaning arises via the narrative genres of romance, tragedy, comedy and irony, i.e. through (modes of) emplotment. Such an integration does not contradict the DHA’s (and CDS’) focus on detailed textual analysis or reject existing foci, e.g. on argumentation, but recognises the centrality of the narrative form for social life and offers further concepts for empirical analyses. This focus on narrative genre contributes, furthermore, to the critical study of meaning-making by revising Jürgen Habermas’ Critical Theory and offering a novel integration of the latter into the DHA, thus providing a theoretically justified, immanent foundation for its critique. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Narratives are everywhere. We tell narratives about ourselves and we make the world meaningful through storytelling. We position others through the narratives we tell and are positioned by stories told about us. And yet, while narratives have, of course, been analysed in critical discourse studies (CDS), including in one of its most popular approaches, the discourse-historical approach (DHA), this article proposes to go a step further by systematically integrating the concept of narrative into the core of the (...) DHA. More specifically, I consider narrative from the perspective of the concept of narrative genre. That is, I propose a focus on how meaning arises via the narrative genres of romance, tragedy, comedy and irony, i.e. through (modes of) emplotment. Such an integration does not contradict the DHA’s (and CDS’) focus on detailed textual analysis or reject existing foci, e.g. on argumentation, but recognises the centrality of the narrative form for social life and offers further concepts for empirical analyses. This focus on narrative genre contributes, furthermore, to the critical study of meaning-making by revising Jürgen Habermas’ Critical Theory and offering a novel integration of the latter into the DHA, thus providing a theoretically justified, immanent foundation for its critique. (shrink)

This article compares the rhetorical strategies employed by American and French scientists in the research article introductions published by both research teams during the so-called ‘AIDS War’. The controversy concerned priority rights for the discovery of the AIDS virus. Using Swales’s CARS model as a comparative template, the results indicated that while the Americans proceeded with a deductive, bold and highly elaborated pattern of rhetorical presentation, the French opted for an inductive, more nuanced and unelaborated rhetoric which prioritized the communication (...) of scientific content at the expense of the writers’ attitude and personal perspective. The observed variations can be accounted for on the basis of perceptions of what constitutes appropriate academic style during the debate, audience design, power relationships and the sociopolitics of knowledge production in American and French scientific cultures. The article concludes by exploring the implications of these results for the use of English in the resolution of global research problems across the intercultural continuum. (shrink)

As a type of public discourse closely related to litigation practices, Chinese legal news reports incorporate the important progress in China’s judicial reform. Meanwhile, due to the competitive pressure and driven by profit, Chinese legal news reports are characteristic of an evident trend of marketization. This article examines how and to what extent sensationalism invades Chinese legal news reports. The research methodology combines the theoretical paradigms of critical discourse analysis and genre analysis, with particular attention paid to (...) the notions of genre and interdiscursivity. The data include 70 legal news reports in Legal Daily. Analytical results show that Chinese legal news reports, although being a highly institutional genre, include a number of sensational strategies which promote the restructuring of legal news reports in China. (shrink)

This book builds on existing work in genre analysis and move analysis in English for Specific Purposes and applies this new framework to academic philosophical discourse, offering new insights into how ESP traditions can elucidate shifts in language conventions across disciplinary contexts. The volume begins by surveying the state-of-the-art in English for Specific Purposes and genre theory, as well as other genre theory paradigms before turning the focus on move analysis. Lucas and Lucas seek to maximize (...) the potential of move analysis to precisely operationalize functional units of discourse by implementing a cognitive theory of genre grounded in frame semantics. Using the case of academic research articles in philosophy, the authors demonstrate how this framework can reveal distinctive dimensions unique to philosophical discourse and in turn, how such an approach might be applied more broadly to examine nuances in language across disciplines and inform ESP research in the future. This book will appeal to students and researchers in English for Specific Purposes, discourse analysis, academic writing, applied linguistics, and rhetoric and composition. (shrink)

Based on the texts of ‘Management Discussion and Analysis on Financial Status and Business’ collected from 118 American corporate annual reports, this study investigated how the professional discourse is realized from the dimensions of text, genre, professional practice and professional culture, according to the framework of the Critical Genre Analysis theory. It was found that In the text dimension, lexicon features regarding vocabulary volume, vocabulary highlighting, readability and sentiment are unique to MD&As; the genre of MD&As (...) corresponds to a rhetorical structure of 3 moves and 10 steps; the professional practice of MD&As is represented by three types of interdiscursivity, that is, shifting, mixing and embedding; the professional culture of MD&As is embodied through identity enculturation, human-oriented value, cooperation awareness and self-serving manner. The results of this study help to better understand the realization of professional discourse and expand the application of CGA in professional practice. The findings presented herein are expected to enhance interdisciplinary research that relates language with corporate performance. (shrink)

The article deals with larger stretches of talk-in-interaction and argues in favor of a descriptive approach, which integrates the structural requirements of global organization, the special type of sequential orderliness within larger units as well as the genre-orientation of these units. Drawing on previous work in conversation analysis, discourse analysis and the sociological genre analysis, the article introduces GLOBE as an analytical tool which functionally links discourse units to conventionalized communicative purposes. GLOBE reconstructs the interactive achievement (...) of genre-oriented discourse units in a three-branch analysis of jobs, devices and forms. The analytical potential of GLOBE is demonstrated in the exemplary genre-contrastive analysis of a narrative, an explanative and an argumentative excerpt. On the basis of the analyses of the three genres, the overarching constitution of genre-oriented global units is then explicated. (shrink)

Verb tenses play an important role in managing deictic relations between the narrator, the audience and the events happening in the story world. Across languages, the Simple Past is considered the conventional story-telling tense, reflecting the prototypical deictic configuration of stories in which the narrator is positioned at some distance from the events unfolding in the story. The Simple Present, on the other hand, is considered a marked option for narration, assumed to automatically result in a shift to a subjective (...) perspective. This paper reports on an analysis of a corpus made up of Dutch fictional short stories, news reports and feature articles. The results suggest that conventions for use and interpretation of verb tenses in narrative contexts are in fact genre-dependent. In the news genres, the Simple Present tense dominated in narration. This did not automatically result in a subjective mode or narration, but was naturally used to express a default narration of story events that temporally overlap with the temporal deictic center of the communicative ground. These findings suggest that previous analyses of verb tenses in relation to narration reflect an over-generalization based on the situational characteristics of prototypical narrative genres such as literary fiction and personal anecdotes. (shrink)

This paper aims to analyse a set of communicative events within the service encounter genre in tourism and leisure interdiscursive domains as displayed in course books on professional communication in English (commonly pointing to ESP). These supposedly replicate interaction in real life settings. Therefore, it is relevant to uncover the ways authentic interactions can be interpreted in the pedagogical setting of workplace conversation from a discursive and pragmatic perspective. More specifically, this empirical and exploratory study discusses ways of improving (...) rapport management skills in interpersonal and intercultural communication, in general, and in professional interaction, in particular, in a selection of excerpts on greeting / asking for info exchanges. The study uncovers participants’ possible co-constructions of civility and politeness strategies in naturally occurring classroom discourse supported by course materials in English for glocal communication across segments in the tourism domain as object of this study. (shrink)

The relationships between text or talk and the context are among the basic fields of pragmatic research and an insight into their nature may contribute to a better understanding of language use. In this article, we use the results of an analysis of discourse marker use in two different conversational genres in an attempt to examine the impact of context on the use of discourse markers, generalized for each analysed genre. In the first stage of the analysis, (...) we observe important differences between the two genres: discourse markers are far more frequently used in telephone conversations than in television interviews. In the second stage of the analysis, we identify several contextual factors which contribute to the differences in the use of discourse markers. In this way, we obtain insight into this particular aspect of genre context-talk relationships, and identify some of the characteristics of the genres in question. (shrink)

This 1995 book takes as its starting point Plato's incorporation of specific genres of poetry and rhetoric into his dialogues. The author argues that Plato's 'dialogues' with traditional genres are part and parcel of his effort to define 'philosophy'. Before Plato, 'philosophy' designated 'intellectual cultivation' in the broadest sense. When Plato appropriated the term for his own intellectual project, he created a new and specialised discipline. In order to define and legitimise 'philosophy', Plato had to match it against genres of (...) discourse that had authority and currency in democratic Athens. By incorporating the text or discourse of another genre, Plato 'defines' his new brand of wisdom in opposition to traditional modes of thinking and speaking. By targeting individual genres of discourse Plato marks the boundaries of 'philosophy' as a discursive and as a social practice. (shrink)

Using therapeutic conversations from a televised talk show as the source data, this article investigates how people solve emotional problems in an institutional setting within a specific social cultural context. In light of the genre framework and the Systemic Functional Linguistics, the investigation considers the TV talk show therapy under examination a distinct genre. The claim is based on the linguistic evidence drawn from the analytical work. As a valid genre the talk show therapy has been characterized (...) with the communicative intentionality to resolve emotional problems and to promote mental health to the public. These components in turn have shaped the generic structures, which become the crucial criteria that constitute a text as a genre. The article proposes that a broader conception of genre framework is an effective research method to describe the textual typologies and interpret the semantic structures of the social interaction in postmodern society. (shrink)

Au cours des dernières décennies, les théoriciens des actes de discours ont amorcé l’analyse des discours afin de décrire la logique qui gouverne l’usage et la compréhension du langage en contexte d’interlocution. Cet article s’inscrit dans la foulée de ces études. Il interroge la fécondité de la notion d’actes de discours en pragmatique littéraire, analyse quelques genres littéraires et propose une typologie des discours composée de huit catégories génériques qui font état des relations logiquement possibles entre les discours factuels et (...) fictionnels, en guise de réponse à une question qu’un théoricien littéraire a posé autrefois aux théoriciens des actes de discours. (shrink)

In comparison with the creation of language, translation from one language to another offers greater challenges for those working with languages, be the text for translation concerned with philosophy, literature or law, all of which are arguably highly professional domains. When it comes to the translation of legal fiction, a highly interdisciplinary genre, even experienced practicing translators tend to fall short of being well equipped with sufficient legal knowledge and terminologies, not to mention the capacity to detect the subtleties (...) that are inherent in a legal term. All of the problems above account for the often less-than-satisfactory quality of legal fiction in translation, misleading or confusing the potential target audience. After making the prior theoretical investigations, this paper attempts to analyze some problems in the current Chinese translation of such legal novels as Franz Kafka’s Der Prozess and Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, and then take a corrective stance, hoping to arouse the translators’ awareness of the importance of this genre, as well as their awareness of the essential professional skills they still need to acquire, so that they can reach equivalent accuracy in legal technicalities, as well as subtlety and nuance that reflect the legal spirit. (shrink)

Søren Kierkegaard's 13 communion discourses constitute a distinct genre among the various forms of religious writing composed by Kierkegaard. Originally published at different times and places, Kierkegaard himself believed that these discourses served as a unifying element in his work and were crucial for understanding his religious thought and philosophy as a whole. Written in an intensely personal liturgical context, the communion discourses prepare the reader for participation in this rite by emphasizing the appropriate posture for forgiveness of sins (...) and confession. (shrink)

This paper aims at clarifying some of the most common issues that legal translators have to face when dealing with the translation of private normative texts, such as contracts or wills, which naturally emerge as the consequence and expression of legal or juristic acts in the scope of private law, in Spanish and English. To comprehend the differences and subtleties regarding legal communication between the common law and the continental law countries (specifically the United States and Spain, respectively), we must (...) unveil some essential clues for their translation and application in the global scope of professional interactions, thus creating a process of inter-legal communication, which takes place through the mutual interpretation and application of two, or more, legal traditions. Through the deployment of a generic or pragmatic analysis at textual or discursive and formal or superficial, strata, of two types of genre within the domain of private law (namely wills and tenancy agreements, or leases) this work aims to prove that both the civil law and the common law private instruments are translatable with respect to each other. An important proviso, however, is that their legal traditions and the genres that constitute the communicative tools of their specialised communities must be duly respected and kept in equilibrium, so that one does not overshadow and obliterate the other. Only in that way can the “convergence” of the two traditions truly enrich and strengthen national and international legal culture. (shrink)

Genre discourse is widespread in appreciative practice, whether that is about hip-hop music, romance novels, or film noir. It should be no surprise then, that philosophers of art have also been interested in genres. Whether they are giving accounts of genres as such or of particular genres, genre talk abounds in philosophy as much as it does the popular discourse. As a result, theories of genre proliferate as well. However, in their accounts, philosophers have so (...) far focused on capturing all of the categories of art that we think of as genres and have focused less on ensuring that only the categories we think are genres are captured by those theories. Each of these theories populates the world with far too many genres because they call a wide class of mere categories of art genres. I call this the problem of genre explosion. In this paper, I survey the existing accounts of genre and describe the kinds of considerations they employ in determining whether a work is a work of a given genre. After this, I demonstrate the ways in which the problem of genre explosion arises for all of these theories and discuss some solutions those theories could adopt that will ultimately not work. Finally, I argue that the problem of genre explosion is best solved by adopting a social view of genres, which can capture the difference between genres and mere categories of art. (shrink)

This thesis is concerned with the ways in which meaning is generically mediated in the novel. In particular it addresses the productive diversity of meanings generated by critical interpretation and asks how, given this diversity, comprehension and consensus might be possible. I argue that the construction of subject, object, space and time is achieved in the novel through different manifestations of four key metaphors: voice, view, setting and event. These metaphors supply meanings that rely on a common experience of embodiment. (...) Embodiment supplies the basis for an intersubjectively established consensus which identifies subjects and objects in terms that correspond to the semiotic, syntagmatic and semantic uses of metaphor. I begin by surveying and reviewing certain constructionist accounts of language and meaning in order to establish the importance of metaphor in conveying meaning in rhetorical, rather than linguistic, terms. I then discuss two examples of continental philosophy on speech: Derrida on voice and Foucault on discourse. I demonstrate how meaning is rhetorically constructed according to the use to which metaphors are put—whether they denote formal, semantic, or functional aspects of meaning—through an explication of Foucault’s theory, reserving Derrida’s grammatology for my analysis of the stabilisation of meaning in the theory of certain narratologists (Gérard Genette and Marie-Laure Ryan). Voice and view are key terms in literary theory, and I examine refinements to these metaphors in Genette and Ryan. The insistence of these narratologists on restricting the rhetorical dimension of meaning undermines the value of the literary work, prompting me to argue for a relaxing of such constraints. I read Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang for its uses of voice and point of view, many of which expose the limitations of the narratological approach. This is a theoretical thesis, which engages a wide range of perspectives—constructionist, deconstructionist, sociological and structuralist—together with their various accounts of language, metaphor, speech and meaning. In terms of sociological approaches to genre and discourse, I employ the chronotope as a critical tool, examining it in the context of the theme of the country house to demonstrate the role of two of my key metaphors, setting and event, which are important for the construction of space and time in abstract terms. Focusing on novels by Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, and Kazuo Ishiguro, in which the country house defines the space and the temporality through which thematic and “material” elements are mediated, I reveal how the chronotope supplies an overarching coherence that unites thought and event in narrative. My readings of these novels describe a theory that is concerned with the rhetorical capacities of genre rather than with taxonomic constructions of form. To this end I argue that the metaphorical dimensions of narrative—voice, view, setting and event—be loosely drawn, according to the acknowledged mutability of genre. I also emphasise the constructive effect of metaphor whilst according it a rhetorical versatility consistent with the mutability and instability of genre as a semiotic tool, concluding that consensus is achieved in our readings of novels through the form’s reliance on these four key metaphors of embodiment. These metaphors have ordinary, everyday, widespread usage beyond narrative theory; in appreciating their rhetorical value, it must be noted nonetheless that any confusion that ensues is productive, for it results in the diversities of meaning and form celebrated in the literary work. (shrink)

This paper examines the contextual constraints and requirements of discursive action in question-answer-sequences based discourse genres (interviews, Prime Minister’s Questions, People’s Prime Minister’s Questions) in mediated political discourse. It considers the multilayeredness of participation and pluralism of discursive action on the one hand, and the delimiting frame of the dialogic discourse genres on the other. It shows that both have a decisive impact on the participants’ meaning-making processes in context: the inherently unbounded participation framework contributes to pluralism (...) of discursive action, while genre- and media constraints narrow down the scope of production and interpretation. This does not only hold for the stage at which a discursive action occurs in the discourse, but also for its degree of explicitness with regard to presuppositions and felicity conditions. (shrink)

Constructional approaches to genre model genre knowledge in terms of genre-based constructions. Like all constructions, these represent conventionalized pairings of meaning and form, of varying degrees of length and schematicity, whose pragmatic specifications include their association with a particular socio-cultural context. In this state-of-the-art article I review genre-related constructional work, discussing grammatical patterns that are licensed only in particular contexts, including conversational genres, as well as expressions that qualify as constructions simply on the basis of socio-cultural (...) currency. The appropriateness of constructional analysis for the language of genre derives from the definitional incorporation of discourse-pragmatic information in constructional descriptions and the possibility of relating genre-bound, idiosyncratic patterns to the rest of the constructions in a language through relations of inheritance. I further highlight the compatibility of Frame Semantics with the notion of genre and critically discuss the concept of conventionality as it applies to genre language. (shrink)

Book Reviews Andrea Wilson Nightingale, Genres in Dialogue: Plato and the Construct of Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv + ~a~. Cloth, $49.95. This is an important and timely book. Nightingale argues that notwithstanding Socra- tes' remarks about dialectic as the philosophical mode of discourse, Plato uses tradi- tional genres in constructing philosophy. Key to her argument are two notions. The first is that prior to Plato, 'philosophy' referred to intellectual cultivation in the broad sense and (...) consequendy, poets, sophists, playwrights, and orators had claim to the title "philosopher." The second is that "genres of discourse" be understood as referring not only to artistic forms or styles, but also to "forms of thought" that represent and conceptualize some aspects of experience better than others; therefore, "an encounter between two genres within a single text is itself a kind of dialogue" . Nightingale.. (shrink)

Genre has been a critical issue in discourse analysis as well as in other disciplines. Based on a literature review of the concept of genre and taking judgments as one type of genre in legal settings, the present study provides a corpus-based insight into the nature of genre. The literature review per se reveals that genre has one typical feature of a sign, that is, being subject to multiple and alternative interpretations; in other words, (...) genre as a sign may have various interpretants. The present study unravels the actual generic structures, distinguishes different types of generic structures within the given genre, and then defines the dominant generic structure of judgments in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Mainland China. This study also examines and contrasts the generic structure potential of judgments in each jurisdiction. In addition, the variation of Mainland China's judgments over time is briefly discussed. Comparing the generic structures of judgments among the three jurisdictions, as well as the structures of judgments in Mainland China over time, the paper argues that genre also has the essential features of a sign, that is, the characteristics of temporality and spatiality. (shrink)

This study uses the genre analysis methodology used in the English for Specific Purposes school, relying mostly on Bhatia’s and Swales models of genre analysis. Two hundred letters of appeal written by postgraduate students whose native language was other than English in a public university in Malaysia were included in the study. The sample included letters written by a variety of students from different language backgrounds. The criterion for selecting the corpus was the communicative purpose of the letters: (...) stating a request. The study analyzed the genre of the letters of appeal to identify the structural or rhetorical moves that existed in the genre. (shrink)

This article maintains that African philosophy should consider those discourses that function as channels of important ideas in African cultures, without prejudice against their language and, especially, their genre. What are such philosophical discourses? This article starts from a case study, Swahili culture, and interrogates the communicative resources available to it to serve as vehicles of philosophical thought. The survey includes language itself, proverbs, musical performance (sung lyrics), metric and free-verse poetry, novelistic prose, theoretical writings, and translations. Based on (...) this spectrum of genres, the article ventures some general observations about the relationship of African philosophy to language and genre. (shrink)