1.- INICIO DE LA RELACIÓN LABORAL.-

The text below is an example of the non-narrative genre of the magazine advice column. In magazine advice columns readers reveal their problems and experts provide solutions and advice. The example is ‘typical of its kind’, instantly recognized as exemplifying a standard format for going about the business of asking for, and receiving, help with problems of everyday life. In the right hand column I use func- tional labels to try and characterize the ‘speech acts’ that make up the text:

I lied on my CV

Revealing a problem (confession)

Should I come clean with my boss?

Appealing for help (question)

Yes

Providing a solution (answer)

But be prepared for the possibility of losing your job if you have a scrupulous Boss

Issuing a caveat (warning)

The bright side: you will gain her respect if you speak up and accept your mistake

Predicting the result (prediction 1)

and having got this burden off your chest will help you focus better on your work

(prediction 2)

The example demonstrates the key characteristics of the social semiotic genre theory (see for example, Eggins 1994: 25ff, Martin, 1992: 546ff):

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A genre consists of a series of ‘stages’ which are given functional labels, such as ‘Revealing a problem’, ‘Appealing for help’, ‘Providing a solution’, to indicate the communicative work done by each stage.

•

Each stage consists of one or more of the same speech acts. For instance a ‘Prob- lem’ stage may consist of one or more sentences realizing a confession (see below). In the above example the ‘Problem’ stage contains only one confession, but the ‘Result’ stage has two predictions.

•

The sequence of stages as a whole realizes a particular strategy for achieving an overall communicative goal, in this case the solution of a problem.

•

Because each stage is homogeneous in terms of the communicative acts it contains, it will also be relatively homogeneous in terms of the linguistic features that characterize it, for instance, the ‘problem’ stage of an advice column will have the linguistic characteristics typical of confessions – it will be a statement, in the first person, using past tense and a verb which expresses what is, in the

context, considered to be a deviant action or state – and the ‘result’ stage will have the linguistic characteristics typical of predictions – it will be a statement, in the second person, using future tense and a verb expressing what is, in the context, considered to be a non-volitional action, in this case an ‘effect’ of ‘coming clean’.

But as I have already mentioned, speech acts can be modulated in different ways. Confessions may be blunt or veiled, predictions confident or tentative, and all this will modify the language used.

Genres, then, are semiotic resources, ‘templates’ for doing communicative things. As such, they are very versatile. The ‘advice column’ genre, for instance, can be applied to many contents, to beauty problems as well as gardening problems, health problems as well as relationship problems, and so on. But that does not mean that genres are neutral, value-free ‘tools’. Genres are culturally and historically specific forms of communication and they realize culturally and historically specific power relations between the communicating parties. The ‘advice column’ genre, for instance, is one of the ways in which society enacts and perpetuates the relation between the ‘helpless’ and ‘ignorant’ lay person and the resourceful and knowledge- able professional ‘expert’. The social critic Ivan Illich (1971: 19) has argued that the growth of professionalism in the nineteenth century gradually ‘disabled’ people, deprived them of their autonomy in fields of everyday life such as food, health, sexu- ality, and bringing up children:

Professionals assert secret knowledge about human nature, knowledge which only they have the right to dispense. They claim a monopoly over the definition of deviance and the remedies needed. In any area where a human need can be imag- ined these professions, dominant, authoritative, monopolistic, legalised – and, at the same time, debilitating and effectively disabling the individual – have become exclusive expert of the public good.

In this way the advice column can be seen as one of the ‘procedures of power’ that constitute what Foucault (for example, 1978: 59ff) has called the ‘microphysics of power’, the way in which power is exercised through everyday routines and habits, including, importantly, everyday communicative practices.

Today the rule of experts is increasingly challenged by the rule of managers and bureaucrats. Doctors, teachers and other professionals complain that they can no longer determine autonomously, on the basis of their professional knowledge and ethos, what will count as illness and how it will be treated, what will count as educa- tional knowledge and how it will be taught, and so on. As a result we may see advice columns gradually replaced by formats which offer people menus of options with which to help themselves, rather than one single authoritative solution. But as such menus are also put together by the agents of powerful social institutions this will not

fundamentally change the situation. It will merely be a new strategy for enacting and perpetuating power.

So far I have used mainly linguistic examples. But the concept of genre is a multimodal concept. An influential early study of the genre of service encounters (Hasan, 1979) used the following key example – the right hand column again displays the functional labels:

Who’s next? I think I am

Sale initiation

I’ll have ten oranges and a kilo of bananas please Sale request Yes, anything else?

Yes

Sale compliance

I wanted some strawberries but these don’t look very ripe They’re ripe alright, they’re just that colour, a greeny pink Mmm I see

Sale inquiry

Will they be OK for this evening?

Yeah they’ll be fine. I had some yesterday and they’re good, very sweet and fresh

Sale inquiry

Oh alright then. I’ll take two Sale request You’ll like them cos they’re good Sale inquiry Will that be all?

Yes

Sale compliance

That’ll be two dollars sixty-nine please Sale

I can give you nine cents Purchase

Yeah OK thanks, eighty, a hundred, three dollars Purchase closure Come again

See ya

Finish

The point is, the transaction is represented here as being realized by talk and by talk alone. To understand it, there is no need for any context, or any non-verbal communi- cation. Shopping in a modern supermarket, on the other hand, does not happen in this way. Every single one of the component activities or ‘stages’ of Hasan’s shopping genre must occur, but they are realized differently. Instead of asking about the quality of the products, they are visually inspected and handled silently. The checkout queue forms silently and the products are silently taken from the trolley and placed on the conveyor belt, although the checkout assistant will perhaps have been told to smile and say ‘hello’, inquire whether you have a loyalty card, and mumble a ‘thank you’. In other words, shopping must still involve ‘sale inquiries’, ‘sale compliances’, etc., but their realization has become multimodal and does not necessarily involve talk. Some of the stages may be realized verbally, others through action, or through writing and

visual communication – reading the price on the shelf, checking the sell-by date or the ingredients on the package. The same applies, for instance, to getting cash from an automatic teller machine. The directives issued by the machine may be visually or verbally realized and the responses will be mechanical actions. This again shows that genres are culturally and historically specific. Shopping happens differently in different cultures and periods. Even within our own culture we may still have, side by side, the old market where produce can be handled and where bargaining is still possible, the shop in which everything is done verbally, as in Hasan’s example, and the modern supermarket.

Here is another example, taken from Paddy Chayevsky’s 1953 television play Printer’s Measure (1994) Note how some of the communicative acts, some of the micro events that constitute this ‘apprenticeship episode’, are realized by speech, others by actions such as looking up, scurrying down the shop, pulling out a letter- head, etc. Remember also that the individual stages, whether they are dominated by speech or action, are all in themselves also multimodal, as pointed out earlier in this chapter: Mr Healey’s summons – ‘Hey! Come here!’ – once performed by an actor, is every bit as multimodal as Kitchener’s call to arms in figure 6.1.

Mr Healey: Hey! Come here! Call to attention

The boy looks up and comes scurrying down the shop, dodging the poking arm of the Kluege press, and comes to Mr Healey.

Mr Healey pulls out a letterhead, points to a line of print

Demonstration

Mr Healey: What kind of type is that? Boy: Twelve point Clearface

Quizzing

Mr Healey: How do you know?

Boy: It’s lighter than Goudy, and the lower case ‘e’ goes

up

Probing

Mr Healey: Clearface is a delicate type. It’s clean, it’s

clear. It’s got line and grace. Remember that

Instruction

Beat it! Dismissal

The boy hurries back to the front of the shop to finish his cleaning

All this applies not just to face-to-face interaction. The stages of print genres, too, may either be realized verbally or visually, or by means of other semiotic modes. In ‘problem-solution’ print advertisements, for instance, the ‘problem’ may be repre- sented verbally, as in an advertisement for hearing aids which opens with the line ‘Want to hear clearly?’ or visually, as in an advertisement for headache tablets which shows a picture of a sufferer with a contorted face.

The boundaries between stages or groups of stages can also be indicated non- verbally. In face-to-face interaction this is often done by means of changes of posture

or position (see Scheflen, 1963). The apprenticeship episode above, for instance, lasts as long as the two participants are facing each other, at the back of the shop. In printed or written text the different sections of the text may be given distinct graphic identities to clearly separate them from each other.

Of course, in some genres most of the work will still be done through language. But overall the relation between language and other semiotic modes is changing – in ways that are quite complex. In service encounters the increasing importance of self service creates a much greater role for visual communication and bodily action. At the same time, the increased use of distance communication has caused many ‘manual’ actions and transactions to become more verbal and ‘dialogic’, for instance instructions – for example, computer help screens and help lines – or medical checkups – telemedicine. And although visual structuring is replacing linguistic structuring in many types of print media, new types of screen genres – for example, websites – make much greater use of written language than older screen media such as film and television. To understand such changes and their products, the study of speech and writing and other semiotic modes needs to be much more fully integrated than has been the case in the past, when media studies paid scant attention to language, and linguistics scant attention to visual media.

In document Especialidad y Maestría en Administración Pública (página 114-121)