The emergence and nature of genres – a social-dynamic account
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Svend Østergaard
Svend Østergård is an Associate Professor at the Center for Semiotics, Aarhus University. His current research interests focus on dynamic models of social interaction and especially how language structure emerges as a result of interaction. He has published a number of articles on dynamic semiotics and the books
Mathematics of Meaning (1997) about the use of catastrophe theory and mathematics in the study of semantics, andKognition og katastrofer (1998) about cognitive linguistics and its relation to the theory of dynamic models.Peer F. Bundgaard is an Associate Professor at the Center for Semiotics, Aarhus University. His research interests are cognitive linguistics and phenomenology as well as the cognitive semiotics of art and aesthetic experience. Articles in
Synthese, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and Semiotica . His most recent publication isInvestigations into the Phenomenology and the Ontology of the Work of Art (Springer, open access, edited with Frederik Stjernfelt).
Abstract
This article has a double scope. First, we consider the dynamics inherent in the emergence of genres. Our view is that genres emerge relative to two sets of constraints, which we aim to capture in our double feedback loop model for the dynamics of genres. On the one hand, (text) genres, or text types, as we will interchangeably call them, emerge as a variation of already existing text types. On the other hand, genres develop as a response to the negative constraints or positive affordances of given situations: that is, either the “exigencies” of the situation or the new resources available in a situation. Accordingly, Section 1 is mainly devoted to a characterization of situations and of the dynamic relation between situational constraints/affordances and genres. Our main claim is that situations and genres stand in a relation of mutual scaffolding to each other so that the existence of a text type is not simply caused by the exigencies present in a given situation, but, once emerged, also feeds back into the situation, further stabilizing or consolidating it: hence, the use of the term “feedback loop.” Section 2 is a more detailed discussion of the dynamics of genres with a particular focus on the first feedback loop: the way genres develop as deviations from existing text types and then stabilize as text types proper with a normative import. The second scope of this article consists in developing a typological apparatus consistent with the dynamic approach to the emergence of genres. This is our parameter theory of genres presented in Section 3. Here we consider genres as governed by parameters external to them and intrinsic to the situations they are dynamically related to. Genres should thus be understood not simply in terms of inherent textual or formal traits, but also relative to a certain set of situational parameters and relative to the degree to which they are governed by them.
About the authors
Svend Østergård is an Associate Professor at the Center for Semiotics, Aarhus University. His current research interests focus on dynamic models of social interaction and especially how language structure emerges as a result of interaction. He has published a number of articles on dynamic semiotics and the books Mathematics of Meaning (1997) about the use of catastrophe theory and mathematics in the study of semantics, and Kognition og katastrofer (1998) about cognitive linguistics and its relation to the theory of dynamic models.
Peer F. Bundgaard is an Associate Professor at the Center for Semiotics, Aarhus University. His research interests are cognitive linguistics and phenomenology as well as the cognitive semiotics of art and aesthetic experience. Articles in Synthese, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and Semiotica. His most recent publication is Investigations into the Phenomenology and the Ontology of the Work of Art (Springer, open access, edited with Frederik Stjernfelt).
Acknowledgments
This article is a revised version of Østergaard and Bundgaard 2014. We thank the editors of this publication Jan Engberg, Carmen Maier, and Ole Togeby as well as our anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and critique.
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©2015 by De Gruyter Mouton
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The emergence and nature of genres – a social-dynamic account
- Cognition and semiotic processing of luminous stimuli in various orders of the natural world
- The elusory kingdoms of the mind: Glosses on José Luis Caivano’s paper
- Swampman encounters an Immediate Object
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- The emergence and nature of genres – a social-dynamic account
- Cognition and semiotic processing of luminous stimuli in various orders of the natural world
- The elusory kingdoms of the mind: Glosses on José Luis Caivano’s paper
- Swampman encounters an Immediate Object
