Volume 39, Issue 1-2

This volume is based on a panel that Peter Muntigl, Helmut Gruber and Eija Ventola organized for the 8th International Pragmatics Association Conference in Toronto, July 2003. The panel was entitled “Approaches to Genre” and had aimed at bringing together scholars from different backgrounds in genre research in order to initiate a critical dialogue. Mostly due to the unfortunate circumstances surrounding this IPRA conference (the SARS crisis that troubled many prospective conference attendants in July 2003), some of the contributors to this volume were not able to attend the conference. Unfortunately, one of the panel participants (Gunter Senft) was not able to participate in this volume. We would especially like to thank Wolfgang U. Dressler for the invitation to publish the papers of our panel as a Special Issue of Folia Linguistica .

Service encounters between the customer and the server are everyday interactions whereby some commodity (material and/or linguistic goods) will be exchanged. This paper argues that the rich nature of service encounters is best revealed by multisystemiotic analyses (semiotically oriented systemic-functional analyses; the term ‘systemiotic’ was first introduced in Ventola 1988). The analyses involve considerations of traditional linguistic levels and e.g. non-verbal behaviour which are seen to be realising other kind of semiosis, register organisation in contexts of situations and genre organisation in contexts of culture, as suggested e.g. by Martin (1992). Genre displays an understanding of our cultural systems and highlights intercultural contrasts when ‘things are achieved differently’. Register captures the richness of activity-and-object orientations (Field), interactant relations (Tenor), and various communication media realisations (Mode) possible in these encounters. Language analyses (discourse semantics, lexicogrammar, phonology/orthography) capture a detailed and integrated analysis of the language used in particular instances. In addition to the linguistic level analyses, we also need to consider other semiotic realisations of genre and register and thus always also attempt to cover the various multimodal and multimedial realisations in any interaction. Although modelling these semiotic relations and justifying them by detailed linguistic (and non-linguistic) analyses has advanced considerably, there still are various areas where there is considerable amount of work to be done. The present contribution reflects on the previous work and attempts to highlight some of the ‘fuzzy’ areas concerning these planes and makes some suggestions on how to enhance the previous exploratory work.

Genres are not what they used to be. They are both more and less. More in the sense that today many genres of interest are increasingly multimodal, making their meanings through the codeployment of resources from both language and other semiotic systems. Less in the sense that as people cross institutional and genre boundaries on shorter and shorter timescales (surfing across television channels from genre to genre, across websites from institution to institution, and living their lives between as well as within multiple jobs, tasks, and institutions), we increasingly not only hybridize formerly insulated genres, but we now also make meaning along our traversals across traditional genres. Genres are becoming units, raw material, for flexible trans-generic constructions: resources for meaning in a new, externally-oriented sense. Looking at genre from these contemporary viewpoints provides insights into the phenomenon of genre from new functional perspectives.

In Communication Linguistics the words genre and register  are used interchangeably. Genre or register reflects what we know about, and do with, language in specific situations in a particular culture. We talk about genre/register as a potential  in terms of the ways it encodes the relationships involved in the situation (Generic Situation) and culture (Communicator’s Communicating Context). Register encodes the representational (field), interactional (personal tenor), medium (mode) and functional relationships at risk in the generic situation, by means of the systems of language that realize experiential, interpersonal and textual meanings in the discourse. We know how to encode various registers in particular situations in a given culture because we have knowledge of both the relationships and purposes involved in such communicative situations and the codal resources that are available to encode them. Both types of knowledge, available to us through personal experience and secondary accounts of such experience, are stored in our gnostology. In this sense, language is both a social and cognitive phenomenon. It is socially and culturally appropriate (or not, as the case may be), and cognitively informed. Although communication linguists talk of register as non-instantial , or potential , in terms of the relevant knowledge available to them as encoders which enables them to interact in a great variety of communicative situations, they also use register to describe the discourse in instantial , or actual , communicative situations. Once they have analyzed a text multi-stratally (lexically, semologically, syntactically etc.) and tri-functionally (experientially, interpersonally and textually), they are able to describe the text as an instance of a particular register with its predictable reoccurring patterns. When the analyst has completed an analysis of a specific text, she compares it to the expectations she held of its register, based on those generalizations stored in her gnostology. This enables her to discuss whether the text under consideration is a predictable unmarked   instance of the register or an unpredictable marked  instance of the register. It also enables her to refine her understanding of the particular register, which she subsequently adds to her gnostological awareness for future comparison. Further analyses increase the sophistication with which the analyst understands the intricacies of registerial configurations. The form of analysis introduced by communication linguists Gregory and Malcolm in the eighties, called phasal analysis, has proven of great value in probing the linguistic composition of both literary and non-literary discourse (1981/95). Phases describe the dynamic instantiation of registerial consistency on a micro-level. Over years of exploration, Malcolm has used phase and phasal analysis to come up with a replicable and exhaustive approach to mapping the discoursal structure that results from the continual, albeit intermittent, fluctuations of such polyregisters as casual conversation (1985, 1986). In the last few years she has redefined a traditional tool with which to investigate complex registers: rhetorical strategies . In her exploration of literary discourse she found that authors seemed to alternate passages of description, narration, dialogue and interior monologue in various ways, and to various degrees, depending on the particular genre they were encoding e.g. science fiction, romances, thrillers etc. Multi-stratal and tri-functional analyses reveal that the character of each of these rhetorical strategies is quite distinct. Such linguistically-specific strategic identities enable the analyst to see very clearly how an author develops one register differently than another. Elements of description and narration, for instance, are kept quite separate (pages apart) in some genres of literary discourse, while they are intertwined in others, even within the same sentence. The value of using rhetorical strategy as a tool to probe the nature of literary genres has motivated her exploration of the rhetorical strategies that develop non-literary discourse. There are, of course, many more rhetorical strategies used in non-literary discourse: comparison, classification, cause and effect, problem-solution, to name a few. And these are not necessarily as stylistically distinct, nor as consistent, as those used in literary fiction. Some seem to operate more in broader structural ways than the consistent linguistic combinations of the literary strategies. However, it would appear that rhetorical strategies offer the analyst a valuable tool, in addition to phase, with which to explore the intricacies of register.

Two major approaches to textual macro-structures have been developed during the last decades: Register & Genre Theory (R&GT) and Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Both stress that textual structures co-occur with contextual relations involving social action and subject matter, role structure and symbolic organization. The approaches, however, significantly differ in their conceptions of textual organization. Whereas R&GT conceives of texts as goal-oriented staged (i.e. linearly progressing, while still allowing for prosodic and recursive realizations of stages) interactions, RST conceptualises them as hierarchically structured entities in which certain elements are foregrounded (nuclei) and others are backgrounded (satellites). Based on empirical analyses of Viennese university students’ essays, we will discuss in what ways generic and rhetorical organizations of texts relate to each other and what advances a combination of these two approaches may offer for text analysis and text linguistics. Through such a combinatory approach to analyzing texts, it becomes possible to identify systematic patterns of textual features in context (using R&GT) and culturally influenced, semantic coherence relations (using RST). Central to our discussion are issues involving the relation between hierarchical versus linear perspectives on text organization and the relation between cohesion and coherence.

The authors of this essay are concerned with examining speech genres in the context of institutional settings. Studies of setting have importance for understanding the ways in which students’ use of speech genres is intertwined with social practices, tool-use, and institutional objectives. After introducing the theoretical assumptions informing the studies described in the article, the authors illustrate institutional social interactions which reveal how children’s and adolescents’ bodies and linguistic practices are organized through time and space. In the first of these settings, children in a Montessori preschool “learn how to mean” in the context of tools and artifacts, genres, and contextual cues. In the second setting, a high school in a large Midwestern city, the researcher examines how students constitute themselves as insiders or outsiders in such settings as the English classroom, the school gymnasium (where special events are held), and the cafeteria. It is in such social spaces that students’ language and behavior both generates and instantiates the dominant group’s social structure. We argue that the organization of bodies/practices in each of these two settings—the preschool and the high school—tacitly accomplishes social and ideological agendas through students’ seemingly “everyday” activities.

Starting with the problem of finding an appropriate tertium comparationis for the contrastive study of linguistic actions in the source language and the target language, which is crucial for the analysis of translated texts and interpreted discourse, the following article deals with some theoretical and methodological issues concerning the concepts of ‘speech action patterns’ and ‘discourse types’ by briefly considering their parallels and differences to the concept of ‘genre’. In the second part of the article, I will try to show the outcome of the practical usage of these concepts in the analysis of multilingual institutional communication. Beginning with some relevant characteristics of interpreted ‘briefings for informed consent’, as determined by previous analyses within the project “Dolmetschen im Krankenhaus”, I will discuss the interplay between different speech action patterns which are supposed to establish this discourse type. I will illustrate the discussion with transcriptions of monolingual and interpreted ‘briefings for informed consent’, in which patients in a hospital are informed about possible complications or risks of a planned medical procedure.

Despite the great scientific interest that linguists have recently shown in the media, magazine covers have hardly been subject to linguistic research. This is the more astonishing as front covers are omnipresent contact texts. Their multimodal character, which combines visual and verbal elements into complex persuasive messages, has a great influence on the competitive press market in two different ways: on the one hand it represents a complex form of advertisement whose visual-verbal rhetorics, in addition to selling the product, also enhance the pleasure in the reading of the text. On the other hand, in its function as a label or even a ‘window’, it can be considered an important pretext which announces, indicates and appraises subsequent texts inside the magazine. In the light of this overall captatio function, this paper intends to give a first overview of the most important visual and verbal means attested in my data – selected covers of Italian and French magazines compiled in the last decade. The language of covers, which is intentionally anchored in a creative visual, proves to be an extensive repertory of deictic forms of which the main function is cataphoric reference. While these are considerated as genre-constitutive according to some underlying semantic-functional criteria, others are occasional tricks created just to capture the reader’s attention. From a strategic viewpoint covers, especially those of the Italian media, are full of such rhetoric devices which mainly cluster in the headlines and their interface with the dominant visual element. Very often, the comical effect that front covers achieve in their immediate context derives from processes of deviation from conventional sign-relationships.

The audio loop is both shaped by, and shaping of, the medium resources, mode conventions, and genre practices associated with sound design and music production. Digital technologies have made it much easier to create and manipulate loops. The conventions surrounding their use have broadened in scope such that loops can form the basic unit of sound design or musical composition on their own. And loops and looping have found their way into almost every genre of music and sound design. Loops have very specific structural and functional properties, built as they are for continuous, uninterrupted, serial repetition. The affordances of these structural and functional properties can be applied to designing and understanding other meaning-making resources in different media, modes, and genres.