Genre mixing on WeChat: evidence from a movie review subscription account
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Yanni Sun
Yanni Sun (1992) is a master’s student at Beijing Normal University. Her research interests include discourse analysis, academic writing, and sociolinguistics. A recent publication of hers is “Study on the influence of TA feedback on college students’ English writing” (2019).
Abstract
Genre mixing and hybrid genre have been vital concepts in genre studies. With the increasing popularity of WeChat, a social media platform in China, a new type of hybrid genre comprised of media content and advertisements is emerging on WeChat subscription accounts. The present study collects 28 hybrid texts from a movie review subscription account in order to closely examine their communicative purposes and generic structure. It is found that instead of being fused into a monocentric entity, these hybrid texts are divided into movie review and advertisement parts, both functionally and structurally dichotomous. This expands and complements the existing understanding of concepts like hybrid genre and genre mixing. It also brings into focus the anti-monocentric nature of these concepts and questions the logocentric framework advocated in genre mixing studies.
1 Introduction
Texts and genres in the real world are dynamic, complex, and diverse. Discursive resources from existing genres are often incorporated to realize new communicative purposes. These processes in which “two or more genres combine to form a new genre or subgenre; or […] elements of two or more genres are combined in a single work” (Duff 2000: xiv) are called genre mixing. The typical products of genre mixing are hybrid genres (Mäntynen and Shore 2014).
Genre mixing and hybrid genre have been central topics to a lot of research in genre studies (e.g. Bhatia 2000, 2004; Feng 2019; Mäntynen and Shore 2014; Zhou 2012). However, disputes over the appropriateness of the concepts have never stopped. Ventola (1987) and Hasan (1989) were among the first to notice and study genre mixing. They found that service encounters include not only business-related communication but also casual conversations. Ventola interpreted this as a genre shift from service encounter to casual conversation, naming it genre-switching, while Hasan regarded these elements as part of the service encounter and named them optional elements. That was the beginning of the lasting disagreement over the description and explanation of this type of discourse.
Scholars like Fairclough (1992), Ravotas, and Berkenkotter (1998), Hasan (2000), and Martin and Rose (2008) refused to recognize this kind of case as genre mixing and rejected terms like hybrid genre, genre hybridity, and genre combination. For them, adopting these terms means denying the interdependence of individual genres, assuming there are clear boundaries between genres, and means admitting certain features are exclusive to specific genres. In their opinion, the mixing process is just a symptom of the indeterminate nature of languages; hence they turned to alternative expressions, such as recontextualization, blending of voices, integrating of one text into another, or intertextuality. Despite these objections, most scholars (e.g. Bhatia 1997, 2004; Catenaccio 2008; Duff 2000; Kong 2006) emphasize individual genres’ internal consistency and external distinction in spite of the fuzzy boundaries among them and believe in the significance of concepts like genre mixing and hybrid genre.
However, the wide adaptation of these concepts just temporally shelved the disagreements instead of resolving them. Martin (1991) and Martin and Rose (2008) believe that during so-called genre mixing, the new genre appropriates elements from other genres and makes them components “partaking in the accomplishment of the telos” (Martin and Rose 2008: 242). Thus, in the strict sense, it is not genres that mix but different linguistic elements that mix and recombine. Zhang and Guo (2019) take a similar perspective. They professed that all genres have telos and ultimate macro goals, even when they have multiple auxiliary or subordinate communicative purposes, and if people believe the genre produced in the mixing process is an established independent genre, concepts like genre mixing and hybrid genre do not make sense. Nevertheless, in contrast to Martin (1991) and Martin and Rose (2008), they did not intend to discard these concepts. They proposed a compromising scheme, keeping the terms but narrowing down their referents. Instead of representing the whole process, genre mixing is said to represent the transformation stage before the generic status of the new texts is established.
However, even if the proposal of Zhang and Guo (2019) is feasible, a crucial issue needs addressing. Their discussions are based on one falsifiable empirical premise, which claims every genre has one macro goal, and different generic elements become components of the new genre as they mix. One cannot help but wonder whether this assumption holds. Is an overarching communicative purpose an inevitable product of the mixing process? Should concepts like genre mixing be dismissed as misuse?
Bhatia (2004) made it clear that hybrid genres result from mixing different communicative purposes. He also rightfully noticed a latent problem in genre mixing, pointing out that it is easier to combine some communicative purposes than others. “It is generally less problematic to appropriate generic features across areas of discourse which serve complementary communicative purposes to create mixed or hybrid genres, as in the case of advertorial, infotainment, infomercial and a number of others” (Bhatia 2004: 119). Nevertheless, he neither elaborated on cases in which relatively incompatible communicative purposes mix nor addressed details such as how communicative purposes of different degrees of compatibility interact and mix and how the ways they mix influence the type of hybrid genres produced. Mäntynen and Shore (2014) touched upon the issue when distinguishing mixing processes that generate brand new genres, such as book-length scholarly essays, from those that do not, such as advertisements containing a recipe. They realized that the types of communicative purposes involved and the way they are integrated influence the nature and results of the mixing process.
Valuable as their insights are, the problem is that all the researchers above based their discussion on one presupposition. In Bhatia (2004), it is implied that complementary purposes mix naturally and those hard to be integrated as a whole do not. In Mäntynen and Shore (2014), the mixing processes either produce new genres with a new central purpose like book-length scholarly essays or become one of the existing genres. It seems they implicitly believe that the mixing processes necessarily produce genres of one center and one overarching purpose. The assumption was made explicit by Zhang and Guo (2019). In hybrid texts like advertorials, they observed that the elements from different genres are integrated to serve one general purpose together. Advertorials include discursive elements other than promotional discourses, namely editorials, appearing “to be reporting or sharing useful information with readers,” while in fact “their ultimate purpose is to deliver the sales message and to persuade readers” (Zhou 2012: 328). That is to say, advertorials do not take on two communicative purposes but one. Editorials and advertisements, discourses of two different sources, are subsumed under one unified purpose, advertising. In the same vein, book blurbs are also merely advertisements in the disguise of book reviews (Gea-Valor 2005; Önder 2013). Based on cases such as these, Zhang and Guo (2019) generalized their conclusion and argued that all hybrid genres possess an overarching communicative purpose.
However, a special kind of hybrid text recently emerging on WeChat official accounts seems to run counter to the assertion above. As advertising serves a main source of revenue, major subscription accounts, such as Liushenleilei, Mimeng, and Yitiao, incorporate advertisements with the media content they regularly release. These texts invariably start with media content and end with advertisements (Pang 2018), intending to provide information and, at the same time, advertise. These two types of texts are arranged in such a way that the media content appears to be a lengthy lead-in to the advertisements. The end products are often regarded as advertisements, marketing through content feeds, and distinguished from traditional hard advertising; it is called soft advertising (Pang 2018). Nevertheless, this new type of advertisement is distinct from typical soft advertisements like advertorials (e.g. Zhou 2012) and book blurbs. Though composed to implant advertisements and defined as soft advertisements, they seem to go beyond mere advertising. In order to implant advertisements on the one hand and to provide meaningful media content on the other hand, the official accounts on WeChat do not treat these hybrid texts as mere advertisements. Unlike advertorials, advertisement parts in these hybrid texts only account for less than 10% of the total length in general (Pang 2018). Enough room is spared for the unfolding of content feeds. Moreover, the writers of these texts might not intend to deprive the media content of its original function. Wang Xiaolei, the writer of WeChat subscription account Liushenleilei Read Louis Cha, explicitly said in an interview that he often ensured the rest of the texts made sense when advertisements were removed (Wu 2017). It seems that advertising, as important a function as it is, is not the only communicative purpose of those hybrid texts.
To testify whether these hybrid texts qualify as a convincing counterexample to Zhang and Guo’s (2019) assertion, the present research takes the approach of genre analysis, examining their communicative purposes as well as the structure and comparing them with typical soft advertisements like advertorials. On the basis of these results, this research discusses what implications the findings have on the theorization of genre mixing, addressing questions such as whether all hybrid genres have an overarching communicative purpose and whether the use of concepts like genre mixing and hybrid genre is legitimate.
There are various types of genres on WeChat subscription accounts. For the convenience of analysis and discussion, the present research chose one genre, movie review, as the material and Dsmovie, one of the most important movie review subscription accounts on WeChat as the research target. In all, 28 hybrid texts were collected to form a mini corpus. The research questions are as follows:
What are the communicative purposes of the hybrid texts?
What is the generic structure of the hybrid texts?
How do these hybrid texts differ from soft advertisements like advertorials?
2 The framework of genre analysis
Move analysis was first adopted by Swales (1990) to analyze the structure of the academic papers. Nowadays, it is deemed a major framework for generic structure analysis. Its major procedures include collecting typical texts of a certain genre, segmenting the texts according to the communicative purpose of the genre, assigning functions to each text chunk, and working out the typical structure of the genre. Move analysis perceives genre as a functional structure embodied in texts. According to move analysis, the basic functional unit of genre is move, whose subordinate functional unit is step. Step, move, and the overall communicative purpose constitute the hierarchical structure of a genre.
However, the original version of move analysis was overly dependent on researchers’ intuition and experience. It did not provide enough information so as to “permit the discussion of general trends, relative frequency of particular move types, and prototypical and alternate patterns of move type usage” (Biber et al. 2007: 36). As a complement, Biber et al. (2007) combined corpus linguistic techniques with move analysis, proposing a research paradigm of corpus-based move analysis. The present research adopts the approach presented by Biber et al. (2007), which can be broken down into five steps: collecting the data; getting a grip on communicative purposes of the genre; developing the coding protocol (listing and defining each possible move and step) through a literature review and pilot analysis; tagging the collected texts according to the coding protocol; and counting out the frequencies of the moves and steps to work out the basic generic structure. Compared with the version presented in Swales (1990), the method adopted in the present study standardizes the partition criteria of both the moves and the steps and offers a precise description of their distribution, thus presenting a more accurate delineation of the structure of a genre.
3 The corpus and research procedure
Movie reviews have a wide audience and a standardized structure, thus making good research materials. This research chose a most influential movie review subscription account on WeChat Dsmovie (iiMedia Research 2016) as the research target and collected all the hybrid texts it displayed between August 2017 and April 2018. A small corpus comprised of 28 Chinese texts and 83082 Chinese characters was built (see Table 1).
Basic information of the data.
| Text | Total words | Average | Total segments | Average | Date of release |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 28 | 83,082 | 2967.21 | 3249 | 116.04 | 2017/8/9–2018/4/18 |
This research used segments as the basic meaning unit in the analysis. One segment expresses a proposition or speech act, which is generally signaled by a comma or period in the Chinese language. The whole corpus was made up of 3249 segments in total, and each text encompassed about 116 segments on average.
This research also collected the comments from the readers and the replies from the writer in the comment area below each text so that it could examine the communicative purposes of the hybrid texts from the perspectives of the readers and the writers. There were 914 comments in total, and 90 irrelevant comments were removed during the analysis since their content is not related to the present research concerns. In the remaining 824 comments, there were 234 comment–response pairs (each pair was composed of a reader comment, followed by a reply from the writer) (28.40%) and 590 pure reader comments without any responses from the writer (71.60%). In total, there were 234 writer replies and 824 reader comments (see Table 2).
Basic information about the comments.
| Comment–response pair | Just comment | Total | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frequency | 234 | 590 | 824 |
| Percentage | 28.40% | 71.60% | 100% |
| Frequency per text | 8.36 | 21.07 | 29.43 |
To analyze the generic structure, the present research employed the top-down corpus-based move analysis approach in Biber et al. (2007). First, the content of the comments was analyzed to explore how writers and readers perceived the hybrid texts. Second, based on the move repertoire of movie reviews from de Jong and Burgers (2013), the move repertoires for advertisements from Bhatia (2004, 2005, Zhou (2012), and Labrador et al. (2014), and the pilot analysis of the present corpus, the research composed a codebook guiding the identification of moves. Lastly, the corpus was tagged. The frequencies of all the moves and steps were figured out, and the generic structure of the hybrid texts was determined.
Finally, based on the results from the communicative purpose and the generic structure analysis, the implications of the research findings were discussed in relation to concepts like genre mixing and hybrid genre.
4 Results
4.1 Communicative purposes of the hybrid texts
Readers’ perception of the hybrid texts was investigated. With the 90 irrelevant comments removed, the remaining 824 comments were classified into three categories: on movie review, on ad, and on both (see Table 3).
Classification of comments.
| On movie review | On ad | On both | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Frequency | 675 | 119 | 30 |
| Percentage | 81.92% | 14.44% | 3.62% |
| Frequency per text | 24.11 | 4.25 | 1.07 |
According to Table 3, most of the readers’ comments (81.92%) are about the movie reviews. A small portion of them (14.44%) are about the advertisements. 3.62% of them are about both the movie reviews and the advertisements. It shows the majority of the reader comments focus on the movie reviews, and a far smaller portion of readers focus on the advertisements. A similar discovery was made in Pang (2018): In this type of hybrid text, the media content gets more attention than the advertisements.
It should not be omitted that the content of both the movie review and the advertisement parts captures the attention of the readers. Some readers comment as if these texts are advertisements, others comment as if they are movie reviews, and a small number of them comment as if they are both. Although the length does not necessarily correlate with the status in the hybrid texts, it does convey the message that, for the readers, the hybrid texts not only advertise but also provide information about the movies. The readers neither nullify the meaningfulness of the information in movie reviews in the presence of advertisements nor ignore the advertisements by treating the hybrid texts merely as movie reviews. Thus, from the readers’ perspective, both parts retain their respective functions, forming a kind of hybrid text that is internally dichotomous.
Subsequently, the research analyzed the comment–response pairs and discovered that readers’ responses match with the writers’ intentions. The writers responded to comments about both the advertisement and the movie review sections, ensuring the realization of the communicative purposes of both parts. Examples are as follows.
Example (1) and example (2) are comment–response pairs on the content of the advertisements. In Example (1), a reader showed a desire to buy the advertised product, and in response to that, the writer gave him/her a push by mentioning the discount at Christmas. In the reply, the writer makes the promotional intention explicit, not only by replying to this reader’s comment but also by persuading the reader to buy the product in the reply. The writer did not just post the advertisement but actively assumed the role of a marketer, trying to influence the reader’s purchasing behavior. In Example (2), the writer’s intent to promote becomes even clearer. When the reader mentioned that her boyfriend had already bought the product for her and she did not need to make the purchase, the writer, like any salesperson, was not satisfied with this answer and suggested the reader buy one for her boyfriend as a return of salute.
| 留言: 看完太想买了! |
| Liuyan: Kan wan tai xiang mai le! |
| Comment: After reading really want to buy! |
| Comment: ‘After reading the advertisement, I really want to buy the product!’ |
| 作者回复: 圣诞买还有优惠哦∼ |
| Zuozhe huifu: Shengdan mai hai you youhui o ∼ |
| Writer reply: Christmas purchase also has discount ∼ |
| Writer’s reply: ‘You can get a discount at Christmas ∼’ |
| (Text 17) |
| 留言: 双十一男朋友给买了, sir 你不早发广告 |
| Liuyan: Shuangshiyi nan pengyou gei mai le, Sir ni bu zao fa guanggao. |
| Comment: Double eleven boyfriend bought for me, Sir you not early post the advertisement. |
| Comment: ‘On 11th Nov., my boyfriend bought it for me. Why didn’t you post the advertisement earlier, sir?’ |
| 作者回复: 再买一部送你男朋友, 情侣机, 情侣硬。 |
| Zuozhe huifu: Zai mai yibu song ni nan pengyou, qinglv ji, qinglv ying. |
|
Writer reply: Again buy one give your boyfriend, couple phone, couple deep love. |
| Writer’s reply: ‘Buy another cell phone for your boyfriend. Couple cell phones signify the couple’s love.’ |
| (Text 14) |
Example (3) and example (4) are on movie reviews. In example (3), the reader showed an interest in the movie and inquired whether it is fit for a six-year-old child to watch. The writer gave an affirmative reply and assured the reader of the movie’s attraction to children. In example (4), interested in the movie and deciding to watch it soon, the reader requested the link to the video, and the writer provided the name of a video platform as a reply. In the two examples, by providing answers to questions regarding the movie, the writer made it clear that the movie review part mattered and that he/she was willing to supplement extra information to better serve the review’s function, namely, to influence the readers’ movie-viewing choice. It seems that, from the perspective of the writer, the hybrid texts are also meant to function as a movie review.
| 留言: SIR,适合6岁娃看吗? |
| Liuyan: Sir, shihe liusui wa kan ma? |
| Comment: Sir, appropriate for six-year-old child watch? |
| Comment: ‘Sir, is it appropriate for a six-year-old child to watch?’ |
| 作者回复: 当然适合, 保证被玩具工厂惊呆 |
| Zuozhe huifu: Dangran shihe, baozheng bei wanju gongchang jing dai. |
| Writer reply: Of course appropriate, guarantee by the toy factory stricken numb with amazement. |
| Writer’s reply: ‘Of course it is appropriate. The child is sure to be dumbstruck with amazement by the toy factory.’ |
| (Text 18) |
| 留言: 又在骗我刷剧, 不行, 我可是要考试的人, 嗯, 资源准备好了吗? |
| Liuyan: You zai pian wo shuaju, bu xing, wo keshi yao kaoshi de ren, en, ziyuan zhunbei hao le ma? |
| Comment: Again trick me into binge-watching, not possible, I am going to take an exam the person, hmmm, resource ready? |
| Comment: Are you trying to trick me into binge-watching again? Not possible. ‘I am someone who is going to take an exam. Hmmm, have you got the link to the videos?’ |
| 作者回复: 考试要紧哦(爱奇艺有) |
| Zuozhe huifu: Kaoshi yaojin o (Aiqiyi you). |
| Writer replies: Exam important (iQiYi has) |
| Writer’s reply: ‘The exam is more important (The videos are on iQiYi).’ |
| (Text 13) |
The dual functions of the hybrid texts are demonstrated in replies where the writers explicitly express that these texts can realize the communicative purposes of the advertisements and the movie reviews simultaneously. These replies were reactions to doubts about the nature of the hybrid texts, since many of the readers suspected these texts were just advertisements. In example (5), the reader showed disapproval of the product placement in movie reviews, insinuating embedding advertisements in movie reviews was a degeneration for Dsmovie. The writer refuted this opinion and argued that advertising is the source of revenue for WeChat subscription accounts (so there is nothing wrong with it) and quality movie reviews speak for themselves (namely, Dsmovie is still confident about the quality and attraction of its movie review articles). In example (6), a reader questioned the reliability of the movie review part by questioning the central communicative purpose of the hybrid texts. As a reply, the writer proclaimed the article was a sincere recommendation of both the product and the movie, suggesting that the communicative purposes of both the advertisement and the movie review were taken into consideration.
| 留言: 每次打开, 必先看阅读量, 看不到10W+就很失落, 再也回不去以前的辉煌了 sir也变成了会打广告的人了 |
| Liuyan: Mei ci dakai, bi xian kan yueduliang, kan bu dao shiwanjia jiu hen shiluo, zai ye hui bu qu yiqian de huihuang le, Sir ye biancheng le hui da guanggao de ren le. |
| Comment: Every time click on, always first check the page views, not see 100 thousand more will be very upset, will not any more return to previous glory, Sir also has become advertise person. |
| Comment: ‘Every time I click on the page, I always check the page views first. If the page view is not over 100 thousand, I get very upset. Dsmovie cannot regain its previous glory anymore. Sir has also become a person who advertises.’ |
| 作者回复: 广告是媒体的收入来源。我相信还能重回巅峰, 内容好一定会有人看到 |
| Zuozhe huifu: Guanggao shi meiti de shouru laiyuan. Wo xiangxin hai neng chong hui dianfeng, neirong hao yiding hui you ren kan dao. |
| Writer reply: Advertisement is the media’s revenue source. I believe will return to the top, good content is sure to have people to see. |
| Writer’s reply: ‘Advertisement is a source of revenue for the media. I believe the official account will return to the top. Good content is sure to be seen by people.’ |
| (Text 4) |
| 留言: 看到广告我开始怀疑, 这片是真心推荐还是配合品牌?你说实话 |
| Liuyan: Kan dao guanggao wo kaishi huaiyi, zhe pian shi zhenxin tuijian hai shi peihe pinpai? Ni shuo shihua. |
| Comment: See the advertisement I start to wonder, this movie is sincerely recommended or to match the brand. You tell the truth. |
| Comment: ‘Seeing the advertisement, I start to wonder whether the movie review is written out of sincerity or just to introduce the advertisement. Tell the truth.’ |
| 作者回复:真心推荐, 也真心配合品牌。 |
| Zuozhe huifu: Zhenxin tuijian, ye zhenxin peihe pinpai. |
| Writer reply: Sincerely recommend, also sincerely match the brand. |
| Writer’s reply: ‘The article sincerely recommends the movie and also sincerely advertises the brand.’ |
| (Text 14) |
The way Dsmovie publishes the hybrid texts online conforms to the writers’ replies in example (5) and (6). The movie review parts were regularly published on the Dsmovie app and other platforms, such as Bai Jiahao, Tvsou, Tencent News, and Netease, just like pure movie reviews. They are deemed to be able to function independently from the advertisement parts.
The analysis above shows that the hybrid texts are distinct from genres like advertorials. Advertorials mix elements from different genres to serve the sole purpose of promoting, and are thus classified as advertisements (Zhou 2012). But the texts in this research embrace the functions of both advertisement and movie review. Readers extract information from both parts, and writers consciously coordinate the functions of both parts. For both parties, the functions of the movie review and advertisement parts in the hybrid texts co-exist. To check whether these hybrid texts are dichotomous structurally, the research also examined their generic structure.
4.2 The generic structure of the hybrid texts
The hybrid texts are made of six moves: introducing the movie, describing the movie, transiting to advertisement, identifying product and purpose, describing the product or service, and encouraging consumption (see Table 4). It can be seen that a clear boundary exists between the movie review and the advertisement parts. Move 1 and Move 2 constitute the movie review part, while Move 4 and Move 5 constitute the advertisement part. Move 3, as a transitional move, summarizes the point made in the movie review to point out the connection between the two parts on the one hand and introduces the advertisement on the other hand. The six moves are comprised of 17 steps. Move 1 and Move 5 contain three steps, respectively. Move 2 contains five steps. Move 3, Move 4, and Move 6 contain two steps, respectively.
The generic structure of the hybrid texts.
| Move | Percentage | Step | Percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Introducing the movie | 100.00% | Lead-in | 82.14% |
| General information | 60.71% | ||
| General comment | 53.57% | ||
| 2 Describing the movie | 100.00% | Describing the story | 89.29% |
| Describing the characters | 60.71% | ||
| Describing the cast and crew | 53.57% | ||
| Describing the behind-the-scenes detail | 50.00% | ||
| Describing the cinematic techniques | 25.00% | ||
| 3 Transiting to advertisement | 100.00% | Extracting the connecting point | 100.00% |
| Introducing the advertisement | 100.00% | ||
| 4 Identifying product and purpose | 100.00% | Background information | 17.86% |
| Introducing the product or service | 100.00% | ||
| 5 Describing the product or service | 100.00% | Objective characteristics | 53.57% |
| Persuasive characteristics | 57.14% | ||
| Recapping the connecting point | 46.43% | ||
| 6 Encouraging consumption | 92.86% | Describing how to get the product or service | 71.43% |
| Soliciting response | 67.86% |
Compared with the complete movie reviews in de Jong and Burgers (2013), the movie review parts in the hybrid texts retain most of the moves. But two ending moves, giving criticism and recommending the movie to the reader, are missing. The movie review ends prematurely to introduce the advertisement. The advertisement parts in the hybrid texts keep all the crucial moves and share a similar structure with the complete advertisements in Bhatia (2005) and Zhou (2012). They introduce and describe the products and encourage the customers to buy them, communicating all the essential messages demanded of advertisements.
Both the movie review and the advertisement parts have a functioning structure. In concert with their communicative purposes, the structure of the hybrid texts is also dichotomous. The transition move works as a connecting point in the middle. The movie review part focuses on the target movie while the advertisement part focuses on the target product, which divides the texts into two different meaning and structural centers. This kind of hybrid text is entirely different from advertorials, which center on the advertised product or service and are structured as advertisements (Bhatia 2004; Zhou 2012).
According to Kanoksilapatham (2007), moves and steps of a frequency above 60.00% are obligatory, and those whose frequencies are below 60.00% are optional. Therefore, all six moves are obligatory, and nine out of 17 steps are obligatory. The obligatory steps are: lead-in, general information, describing story, describing characters, extracting the connecting point, introducing the advertisement, introducing the product or service, describing how to get the product or service, and soliciting response.
The advertisement part is structurally less stable than the movie review part. As shown in Table 4, Move 5 in the advertisement part, though enjoying a frequency of 100%, does not have any obligatory steps. Its structure is highly unstable. Moreover, Move 6 in the advertisement part is the only move with a frequency below 100.00%. In several hybrid texts, it is missing, and the advertisement part just ends with the description of the product or service.
The movie review part is more elaborate than the advertisement part. Move 1 and Move 2, which form the movie review part, respectively contain three and five steps. They have a wider range of steps to choose from than the moves in the advertisement part (Move 3, Move 4, and Move 5) do. Move 4 and Move 6 in the advertisement part each contain only two steps, and the first step in Move 4 rarely appears (17.86%). When further examination is conducted, things become more obvious. In the advertisement part, there are three obligatory steps, introducing the product or service (100.00%), describing how to get the product or service (71.43%), and soliciting response (67.86%). The advertisement part only gets to complete a basic promotion task, namely stating what the product or service is, showing how to get it, and urging people to buy it. The move concentrating on details, namely, detailing the characteristics (100.00%), does not possess any obligatory steps, thus having no fixed content or structure. In contrast, the movie review part goes beyond offering general information about the movie. Instead, it gets to detail about the movie in two obligatory steps, describing story and describing characters.
To obtain exact data regarding the elaborateness of the moves, the present research also counted the numbers of segments that each move in each text takes up. It worked out the average proportion (based on segment) each move takes up in a text, and the average number of segments each move encompasses in a text (see Table 5). Move 2 takes up 70.70% of a text on average, making the most elaborate move. Move 3 (10.29%) ranks the second, followed by Move 1 (9.66%). Move 5 (6.09%), Move 6 (2.62%), and Move 4 (2.53%) are the briefest.
Number of segments for each move.
| Movie review part | Transition | Advertisement part | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Move | Move 1 | Move 2 | Move 3 | Move 4 | Move 5 | Move 6 |
| % | 9.66% | 70.70% | 10.29% | 2.53% | 6.09% | 2.62% |
| Average number of segments | 11.21 | 82.04 | 12.22 | 3.00 | 7.07 | 3.04 |
Data shows the movie review part is longer than the advertisement part. Move 1 (9.66%, 11.21) and Move 2 (70.70%, 82.04), especially Move 2, which takes up more than 50% of all segments, dominate in length, surpassing Move 4 (2.53%, 3.00), Move 5 (6.09%, 7.07), and Move 6 (2.62%, 3.04). Combined though retaining a complete structure, the advertisement part seems to compromise in length. The attention span of the readers of WeChat subscription accounts is limited. The length of articles that Dsmovie releases does not normally exceed 4,000 words, according to its founder Jun He (China Advertising 2017). Presenting all the crucial moves with a limited number of words requires compression and even elimination of certain content. What to delete varies from text to text, which explains why the advertisement part, though complete, is less stable and less elaborate than the movie review part.
The process of combining the movie review part with the advertisement part brings changes and adjustments. The movie review part loses two important ending moves. The advertisement part compromises in stability and intricacy. Nevertheless, in general, the movie review and the advertisement parts are largely independent. The remaining moves of the movie review unfold steadily and elaborately and maintain an advantage in length. The advertisement part gets to keep a complete structure. The move between the two parts mainly serves as a link, stating and rationalizing the connection.
These findings indicate that the mixing process brings changes, but these changes are not substantial enough to lead to a complete fusion of the movie reviews and the advertisements. In accordance with the dichotomous configuration of communicative purposes, the hybrid texts are dichotomous in structure too. The two parts are better described as being welded rather than being fused together.
5 Discussion
Zhang and Guo (2019) believe that during the process of genre mixing, different generic elements will invariably be transformed and then subsumed under an overarching purpose. Admittedly, this would have happened to the movie review, too, when it is incorporated with the advertisement. As shown in the analysis of example (5) and example (6) in Section 4.1, some readers do question the quality and sincerity of the movie review parts due to the existence of advertisements. They suspect that the writers compose the movie reviews in these texts solely for promotional purposes, namely to introduce and promote the advertised products. In other words, they suspect the movie review, as a meaning-oriented genre, is reduced into an elaborate lead-in to the advertisement. However, this force of subjugating the movie review part to a component of an advertisement is consciously contained by the writers. Various efforts are made, such as affirming the reliability of the movie review part through writer replies, maintaining its basic structure, guaranteeing its elaborateness, and publishing it independently on various platforms. These efforts pay off. The analysis of both communicative purposes and generic structure in Section 4 shows that the hybrid texts are not a unified entirety, neither functionally nor structurally. Both the movie review and advertisement parts get to retain their independence.
Not only does this contradict the assertion of Zhang and Guo (2019) and show that hybrid texts do not necessarily have an overarching communicative purpose, but it also challenges the current understanding of the concepts of genre mixing and hybrid genre. When taken further, it brings into question the monocentric logocentrism that dominates genre mixing studies.
Scholars like Martin (1991) and Martin and Rose (2008) pointed out that so-called genre mixing is actually an appropriation of discursive resources from other genres, and the end product is a newly independent genre instead of a mixture of different existing genres. Based on this stance, Zhang and Guo (2019) proposed that the referents of terms like genre mixing and hybrid genre should be limited to genres in the transition stage, whose genre status is not yet established.
The argument above makes sense in the cases of previous studies, but not in that of the present research. In the hybrid texts, the movie review and advertisement parts retain their own communicative purposes without reducing either part to a subordinate. The genres in question keep their original genre identities during and after the mixing process. Different discourses are welded together rather than completely fused. That makes the end products hybrid texts in a strict sense. Therefore, with exact referents in reality, concepts like genre mixing and hybrid genre are no longer inadequate signifiers. Contrary to what some scholars (e.g., Fairclough 1992; Hasan 2000; Martin and Rose 2008; Ravotas and Berkenkotter 1998) advocated, these concepts should be preserved rather than discarded.
Scholars like Hasan (1989, 2000, Martin (1991), Martin and Rose (2008), Duff (2000), and Zhang and Guo (2019), though taking different stances regarding terms like genre mixing and hybrid genre, in essence all investigate genre mixing phenomena in light of an explanatory framework featuring logocentrism. It maintains that texts only have one center and assumes that elements from different genres lose their original functions during the mixing process, becoming constituents of a new center. The present research challenges the universality of that assumption. In the research, the hybrid texts of movie reviews and advertisements are dichotomous functionally and structurally, thus essentially multi-centered and defying any unified communicative purposes. Although attempts at rationalizing the combination and connecting different discursive resources are made, such as cutting down certain moves in the movie review, compressing the advertisement part, and inserting the transitional move, the texts are still not completely integrated. This type of hybrid text embodies the spirit of collage, an anti-logocentrism postmodern literary technique.
“拼贴…打破了时间的前后、空间的顺序、因果的关系、逻辑的连贯…把似乎毫不相干的片断构成相互关联的统一体。拼贴本质上正是在于否定完整、连贯的传统标准” [Collage…breaks the sequence of time and space and interrupts the causal relationship and continuity of logic…connecting fragments which are otherwise unrelated…its essence lies in the negation of the integrated and coherent traditional standard] (Wei Xu 2008: 124). The true essence of collage is not to break the old center and build a new one but to get rid of this monocentric and logocentrism mindset.
Noticeably, the creative combination of unrelated elements does not just lie at the heart of collage but also lies in the very definition of concepts of genre mixing and hybrid genre in the strict sense. Genre mixing only fits when what mix are genres rather than mere elements from different genres, and genres are hybrid only when they are made of different genres rather than different discursive resources. Genre mixing and hybrid genres in the strict sense require the components involved to maintain their heterogeneity and refuse assimilation. This multi-centered side of these concepts was suppressed until the hybrid texts in the present research foregrounded it.
Notions like telos and overarching communicative purposes implied in research like Martin and Rose (2008) and Mäntynen and Shore (2014) and emphasized in Zhang and Guo (2019) clearly go against the definition and nature of these concepts by assuming the opposite and supporting a monocentric view of genre. Obviously, the disputes surrounding concepts like genre mixing and hybrid genre mainly lie in the self-contradictory behavior of understanding concepts that defy center and logocentrism through a lens of logocentrism. To keep the framework by ignoring the mismatch, narrowing down the referent of the concepts, and omitting cases that do not fit the framework is counterproductive. The emergence of this new type of hybrid text in the present study reminds scholars that it is time to confront this mismatch and adjust the current logocentrism framework.
It is also worth mentioning that the type of hybrid text in the present research is not an exceptional case, and its way of mixing texts is being adopted by more and more writers on WeChat subscription accounts. According to Pang (2018), this kind of advertisement at present accounts for 36% of all advertisements on WeChat subscription accounts. With the development of new media, new cases of genre mixing will emerge, and more genres with ambiguous identities will be produced. An accommodating framework sensitive to new hybrid texts and prepared to take them in is needed.
6 Conclusion
Mixing of advertisements and movie reviews produces hybrid texts dichotomous in both communicative purpose and structure. They combine the functions of movie review and advertisement, and they are clearly divided into two parts with a transition move lying in between. Admittedly, when the two parts are welded together, the movie review part loses two important moves in the end, and the advertisement part becomes sketchy, as well as unstable. Nevertheless, the structure of both parts is largely preserved, and the parts are able to function independently.
This type of hybrid text embodies genre mixing in the strict sense, validating the use of concepts like genre mixing and hybrid genre. It emphasizes the multi-centered nature of these concepts and challenges the logocentrism framework in genre mixing studies. Genre mixing does not necessarily lead to monocentric hybrid texts; instead, it may produce texts with dichotomous structures and multiple communicative purposes that cannot be integrated. This type of hybrid text is proliferating on WeChat, and with the development of new media, genre mixing may appear in new forms. A new and more accommodating framework is needed.
The present research is mainly based on a movie review subscription account on WeChat. In the future, linguistic data from other genres can be brought in, and a corpus of a larger scale can be used so that the conclusions in the present research can be tested. At the same time, ethnographic research methods like interviews can be introduced to supplement genre analysis with richer data, therefore facilitating a more accurate and comprehensive exploration of the communicative purposes and the structure of the hybrid texts.
About the author
Yanni Sun (1992) is a master’s student at Beijing Normal University. Her research interests include discourse analysis, academic writing, and sociolinguistics. A recent publication of hers is “Study on the influence of TA feedback on college students’ English writing” (2019).
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Part One: Cultural Signs and Sign Theories
- Culture codes and semiotics
- On a Chomskyan postulation in conceptual metaphor theory
- The narrative function of temporal signs: toward a semio-narratology approach
- Chuang Tzu’s selflessness: mind-state and the cultural semiotics of jingshen
- Part Two: Cultural Signs and Social Practices
- Genre mixing on WeChat: evidence from a movie review subscription account
- Constructing online tourist destination images: a visual discourse analysis of the official Beijing Tourism website
- The social semiotic context of the fashion show
- Obituary
- Hongwei Jia, talented Chinese semiotician and translator, passes away at 44
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Part One: Cultural Signs and Sign Theories
- Culture codes and semiotics
- On a Chomskyan postulation in conceptual metaphor theory
- The narrative function of temporal signs: toward a semio-narratology approach
- Chuang Tzu’s selflessness: mind-state and the cultural semiotics of jingshen
- Part Two: Cultural Signs and Social Practices
- Genre mixing on WeChat: evidence from a movie review subscription account
- Constructing online tourist destination images: a visual discourse analysis of the official Beijing Tourism website
- The social semiotic context of the fashion show
- Obituary
- Hongwei Jia, talented Chinese semiotician and translator, passes away at 44
