The conception of genre is crucial for both linguistics and literary studies and took place as early as Aristotle’s Poetics. It is literary in origin: in the eighteenth century, the French term genre (‘kind’) was introduced as a loan word by so-called ‘English commentators’ (Corbett 2006: 26) or literary historians who attempted to differentiate between different types and developments of literary or artistic text production. Following the models and literary conceptions first outlined by Aristotle and Plato, they stress that literary genres and their dynamics are considered to be recognisable by their compliance with conventions of form, content and use of language (Corbett 2006: 26). Aristotle also distinguishes between the genres and characters of tragedy and comedy, focusing on the stylistic features of the different sub-genres. This basis in the Aristotelian model is enhanced by ‘a metaphysics and an epistemology which derive from Aristotle’s natural philosophy and the link between the philosophy of natural kinds of texts and sociocultural classes of people’ (Threadgold 2001: 235). In other words, human beings have always categorised along a scale of values or a set of characteristics.
The conception of genre has been applied to a number of (linguistic) disciplines, but with different emphases. Generally speaking, categories and theories of genre initially serve the purpose of acting as descriptive and analytical, and prescriptive or pedagogical tools (Threadgold2001: 236). At the same time, they are, however, used in models of text reception and reading and seen as forms of communication in a sociocultural context.
In the twentieth century, the focus shifted from viewing genres as a fixed and absolute set of conventions to regarding them as dynamic conventions
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connected with changing institutions and social goals. Bakhtin (1986) refers to speech genres, which are forms of speaking or writing that people employ, mix or change according to particular social contexts. He shows that genres are at the centre of language use because all language usage belongs to one genre or another, and genres are essential for communica-tion and for creating and interpreting texts. Bakhtin distinguishes between primary genres, which are everyday communication activities, and secondary genres, which are more explicitly and consciously produced, such as literary works. The evolution of genres is therefore a dialogue because new writing builds on earlier forms and creates a mosaic of quotations. Textual transmission and adjoining genres can thus be investigated through the study of intertextuality. Alastair Fowler (1982) also emphasises the blurred and fuzzy edges of genres, the dynamics of genres and their changes in the course of time. He draws on the prototype approach and illustrates that knowledge of genres is one of the prerequisites to recognising generic patterns.
Classifications of genre and their contextual embeddedness include and disclose a complex system of values of, for example, an institution, an author or a speech community: ‘There have always been implicit and explicit social and aesthetic, and even moral values associated with the classification of genres’ (Threadgold2001: 235) and what counts as canon in the teaching of literary studies, for example (especially Bloom 1995).
Hierarchies of genres are often linked with explicit or implicit social and moral values expressed in handbooks or style guides, or, more ideologi-cally loaded, in fierce attempts to suppress minority languages as the Plain English Debate in the UK shows. As early as classical rhetoric, high, middle and low styles have been emphasised. These classifications reso-nate processes of sociocultural labelling of social classes based on the modes and styles that characterise them. At the same time, these labels are associated with the most powerful social and cultural institutions of government, religion, law and cultural authorities or with the label high culture (as opposed to popular or low culture). Analogous to the social foun-dation of any genre formation and evaluation are, for example, the for-mation of national language standards and attempts at critiquing language or at what Deborah Cameron (2012) calls ‘verbal hygiene’. A standard of a language is often selected according to what is considered ‘the best’ by a prestigious, elitist social group. Verbal hygiene, in turn, describes active practices of improving and filtering normative patterns of language usage – that is, ‘discourses and practices through which people attempt to “clean up” language and make its structure or its use conform more closely to their ideals of beauty, truth, efficiency, logic, correctness and civility’ (D. Cameron2012: ix).
The use of the term genre incorporates conceptions such as convention, communication and styling as well as value judgements and descriptions of the characteristics of actual texts, classes of texts, groups and systems
of text classes, and descriptions of genre, which are theorised as social practice. At the same time genres may be conceptualised as reflecting human beings’ cognitive schemata and world knowledge. Here genre is seen as a mental frame in people’s minds which consists of their knowledge of schemata, scripts (Schank and Abelson1977) and belief systems (Jucker and Taavitsainen 2013). People are able to understand and recognise these genres because in cultural contexts they are realised on a contin-uum of conventions on the one hand and creative foregrounding on the other. Genres may function as ‘horizons of expectations’ (Jauss1970) for readers to know what to expect. These help guide the making, writing and processing of texts. Indeed, more recent attempts at defining genre and genre analysis have ‘gone social’ and see genre as ‘an approach to communication which emphasises social function and communicative purpose’ (Swann et al.2004: 123). Genres are inherently ‘dynamic cultural schemata used to organise knowledge and experience through language.
They change over time in response to their users’ sociocultural need’
(Taavitsainen2001: 129).
As such, interpersonal relations and functions of genres become more and more important because the communicative situation is one of the essential criteria in assessing why a text is written the way it is or whether it still shows some of the features of textuality outlined by de Beaugrande and Dressler (1981). Enkvist (1987) defines text strategies adopted by the genre-user according to their envisaged goals as the basic communicative principles in the broader framework of texts. Another crucial text-linguistic model which is based on communicative situations is Werlich’s (1976) model of the five basic text types: descriptive, narrative, expository, argumentative and instructive. He provides prototypical lin-guistic realisations of these text types and stresses that they can be com-bined. Berkenkotter and Huckin’s (1995) conceptualisation of genre incorporates this communicative and contextualised view of genre by developing a number of useful questions, which include:
1. Where does the genre come from and where is it going?
2. What does a text in this genre look like and what does it say?
3. How (and where and when and why) do people use this genre?
4. What sort of society does the genre create?
5. Who owns this genre?
In corpus linguistics, genres as well as representative extracts of text types are essential for the compilation of a corpus because linguistic features and repeated patterns, which have functional and conventional associations, are distributed in certain ways in various registers and genres. In other words, genres are one of the important parameters in compiling a representative, evenly balanced and evenly sized corpus for comparative studies of communicative phenomena (see Biber and Finegan 1988). Register is a related term here because it refers to situated language
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usage, which includes the setting, interactiveness, the mode of speaking, the goal and the theme addressed (Biber2011: 707). At the same time, it can also be described in relation to the linguistic features used. Register would then relate to the language of advertising or the language of sports.
With a focus on variation, register is at the centre of investigations in corpus linguistics and usually any corpus also includes excerpts from literary language, usually narrative fiction (see also Mahlberg,Chapter 17, this volume, on ‘grammatical configuration’ and the conception of ‘local grammar’). For example, the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al.1999) uses a corpus-based methodology to analyse how the characteristics of particular linguistic features can be described on the basis of their grammatical and structural functions and their ‘behaviour’
across spoken and written text types. They also have a chapter on ‘lexical bundles’, which describe multi-word patterns of usage that are character-istic of a particular register. In the multidimensional approach (Biber and Finegan1988), statistical and corpus-based investigations are employed to analyse profiles of linguistic patterns that vary in register. Biber’s study can be seen as one of the most important studies of genre which, in (historical) corpus linguistics and pragmatics, sparked ground-breaking genre-based quantitative investigations of linguistic patterning. From over 481 text extracts over 23 genres, Biber and Finegan (1988) chart the co-occurrence of 67 linguistic features and their functions. The dimensions of variation and stability are identified statistically by factor analysis (later cluster analysis), providing the co-occurrence patterns of linguistic fea-tures. Communicative functions are categorised along the following dimensions of styles: a) involved versus detached; b) elaborated versus situated; c) abstract versus non-abstract. Styles are simply defined in terms of the joint effects of multiple features and co-occurrence patterns.
In these approaches, register differs from genre in that the former denotes more generally a type of language use of or in a particular domain.
Special emphasis is placed on the analysis of lexicogrammatical features.
Genre here receives additional cultural nuances because specific profiles and conventions are known and actively produced by particular groups of people in a sociocultural context.
Genre studies since the early 1990s have focused on a number of text types, both literary and non-literary. This is due to new technologies and massive digitisation processes as well as discoveries of new texts. At the same time, genre boundaries have been moved.