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DISCOURSE ANALYSIS
Ch 1. What is ‘‘Discourse’’?
Is a complex concept because a lot of description can be given to this word. It just consider various aspects of this concept. All phenomena of symbolic communication between people, usually through spoken or written language or visual representation (=MULTIMEDIA DISCOURSE). It involves a communicative situation in which people exchange messages. In this case we have a discourse when people create a sentence, a message in a formal language to communicate with someone else, to be understood by somebody else who can react, replay. Discourse is produced only when communication takes place. There is no communication unless there is someone who produce and someone who receive the message. We can communicate using two channels: written language and oral language. We can also communicate with gesture, face moving etc., body language. VERBAL LANGUAGE IS NOT THE ONLY CODE we can use to communicate. General communication that takes place in specific institutional context. Here we talk about specific form of language and communicative situation. They are used to convey specialist knowledge. Specific speech, involves only those ones who, using it, are specialist of that field. When we communicate with someone who is not specialist of a field, he is not able to understand. This is the case when we go to the doctor and he use language we cannot get, because we didn’t study medicine. With us the doctor should use a common language. With other doctors they can use a specialist language. A whole act of communication involving production and comprehension, not necessary entirely verbal, which takes place in a real context, among two or more participants. It involves production and comprehension not necessarily verbal. In this case communication takes place in a real situation. It is not a discourse if the content of the production is not real. It always involves communication, as well as communication involves a real content.
What is discouse analysis?
Discourse anaylisis, according to Zelig Harris , who introduced this expression, is considered as a way of analysing speech and writing together. It looks at the patterns of the language across the text and the relationship between language and social context. Also it examine the different points of view and understandings about the use of the language, which influence the relationship between the discours’participants, as well as social identities and relations constructed through the discourse. To sum up, the aim of discourse analysis is to explain why people adapt their way of speaking and writing in the contexts in which they work and to identify the strategies which are employed to achieve communicative goals. There are typical ways of using language in particular situations, which share particular meanings and characteristic linguistic features associated with them. What these meanings are and how they are realized in language is the central interest to discourse analysis.
The relationship between language and context
It consist of the way people know how to interprete the context in which they are linked to what their interlocutor says. According to Van Dijk ’s researches, context’s construction is subjective, that means it’s based on the shared knowledges and interpretations between language users in order to communicate with each other.
Furthermore, the link between society and discourse is often indirect and depends on how language users define the genre of communicative event in which they are engaged. Briefly, it’s not the social situation that influences discourse, but the way the participants define the situation in which the discourse occurs. As more important contributions in the discourse analysis area are given, Firth distinguish the context of situations from the context of culture in which the discourse is developed; Halliday link these two contexts with a range of possibilities to use language and create a text. Basically, a person chooses an option due to a particular culture of the context, where the situation takes place and aims to influence the use of the language in the text; Sinclair shows his main interest in the analysis of the meaning and language’s forms, adding his studies about language’s uses when they naturally occur in the context.
The discourse structure of texts
Discourse analysts are also interested in how people organize what they say first, and what they say next and so on in a conversation or in a piece of writing. This is something that varies across cultures and languages. Mitchell was one of the first researchers to examine the discourse structure of texts. He looked at the ways in which people order what they say during their interactions. He looked at the structure of these kinds of texts dividing it into steps which language users go through. Also Mitchell discusses how language is used as cooperative action and where the meaning of language lies in the situational context in which it is used than in the context of the text as a whole.
Hasan continued this work of Mitchell in analyzing service encounters or professional emails, He highlights mandatory and optional stages which are typical of the language in service encounters. Hasan also points out that there are many possible ways in which the phases established a service encounter and this can be achieved in terms of language. The ways in which these elements are expressed also vary not only depending on the situation on the location where the service meeting would take place, but also on variables such as the age of the people involved in the interaction and whether the service encounter is face to face or on the phone. In addition, researchers working in the conversation analysis have examined how people alternate their speech using of overlaps, pauses, increases in volume and tone of voice and what these reveal about the way people relate to each other in what they say and do with language.
However we have to separate two concepts. There are different definitions of discourse and text.
David Crystal Discourse = a continuous stretch of language larger than a sentence, often constituting a coherent unit, such as an argument, or a narrative. Text = A piece of naturally occurring spoken, written, or signed discourse identified for purposes of analysis. It is often a language unit with a definable communicative function, such as a conversation. Cook Discourse = Stretches of language perceived to be meaningful, unified, and purposive Text= A stretch of language interpreted formally, without context Chimombo and Roseberry Discourse = A process resulting in a communicative act
Discourse as the social construction of reality
Johnstone (2007) The view of discourse as the social construction of reality sees spoken and written texts as communicative units which are embedded in social and cultural practices. Discourse, then, is both shaped by the world as well as shaping the world. Discourse is shaped by language as well as shaping language. It is shaped by the people who use the language as well as shaping the language which people might follow. Discourse is also shaped by the medium in which it occurs as well as it shapes the possibilities for that medium. The purpose of the text also influences the discourse, as well as discourse shapes the range of possible purposes of texts.
Examples: Wetherell ’s analysis of the BBC Panorama interview with Princess Diana of Wales, highlights the
role of language in the construction of the social world. In this case, Diana presenting herself as a sharing person and creates a view of herself and the world in which she lives in a way that she
wishes people to see.
Harney in her book The China Price shows how reality is changing with regional labour shortages
and rising wages. There are Chinese factories that had to close, move their business to other parts of China where labour costs are lower or sent their work outside of China because they had not been
able to maintain their earlier level of pricing.
Discourse as socially situated identities
Discourses involve the socially situated identities, which are recognized in the different context where we perform different styles of language, in order to recognize identities and activities.
Discourses also involve characteristic ways of acting, interacting and feeling, thinking and
knowing, speaking and listening, reading and writing, etc.
Discours as a performance
The notion of “performativity” derives from speech act theory of the philosopher and linguistic
Austin. It is based on the view that in saying something, we also do it.
Thus, people are who they are because of the way they talk and what they do. It is in the “doing” that the identity is produced.
Ch. 2 – Discourse and society
Swales provides a number of characteristics to identify a group of people as members of a particular discursive community. The group must have a set of common goals, such as communication
mechanisms and ways of ensuring the exchange of information between its members. The community must have its own set of specialized terminologies and a high level of expertise in
his particular field. The ways in which people communicating with each other and exchanging
information will vary depending on the group. This could include meetings, newsletters, casual conversations, or a number of other types
of written and/or spoken communication. Therefore, each discursive community has particular ways of making members interact with each other.
There will also be a threshold level of proficiency in using the genre that the discursive community uses for its communications so that someone can be taken into consideration in that community. Cameron ’s study of telephone call centres in the United Kingdom suggests what some of the characteristics of this kind of discourse community might be. She found, for example, that the telephone operators in the call centres she examined were trained to communicate with customers on the phone in different ways. They were asked to pay attention to the pitch of their voice so that they conveyed a sense of confidence and sincerity in what they said. Also they were required to talk neither too loudly nor too quietly, or neither too fastly nor too slowly. They were also required to provide sufficient feedback to their callers so they knew they had been understood. Call centre workers also have common goals, that of providing the service or making the sales for which the centre is set up, or common ways of sharing information among telephone
workers, their own particular service call genres and their own language's level they use to introduce the product or service they are dealing with.
Discourse communities also interact with wider speech communities.
For example, the academic discourse community of students and academics also interacts with the speech community of the town or city in which the academic institution is located.
Devitt adds to this discussion by proposing three types of language user groups: communities,
collectives, and networks. Communities are groups of people who share time together in common
activities, for example a group of people who all work in the same office. Collectives are groups of people who form around a single particular interest,
in which they may also be experts. Networks are groups of people who are not so closely united except by means of sent e-mail
messages received from people who may have never met, but who at the same time participate in
the conversation.
Language as social and local practice
Speakers, then, often have a repertoire of social identities and discourse community memberships.
They may also have a linguistic repertoire that they draw on for their linguistic interactions, so they
have a number of languages or language varieties they use to interact in within their particular communities. The choice of language may be determined by the domain the language is being used
in, such as with family, among friends and in educational and employment settings. Social factors, such as who we are speaking to, the social context of the interaction, the topic, type,
function and goal of the interaction and the status of each of the speakers, are also important
for accounting for the language choice that a person makes.
The students used a language they called ‘Dross’ as a way of creating an in-group identity
as members of the club, through the use of formulaic language to indicate that what was about to be said was gossip, and may not be true.
Richardson argues that the members’ identities presented in the newsletter are constructed through
differentiation. That is, they defined themselves ‘by that which they are not’, talking and writing in ways that are different from members of other cricket clubs.
They also described the club as a heterosexual-only zone by using terms such as ‘poofter’ and ‘poofs’ , which are derogatory terms for gay men, reinforcing the expectation that members
of the club will be heterosexual and that the identity of homosexual male is not appropriate
for membership of the club.
Hall ’s study telephone sex workers’ language in the United States provides another example of how speakers create gendered identities through their use of language.
Not all of the sex workers in Hall’s study were heterosexual, nor were they all female.
One was a male Mexican American who was able to ‘replicate’ Asian, Latina and Black women’s personas though his use of accent, intonation, voice quality and choice of vocabulary.
The workers, thus, used ‘gendered styles to construct sexual meaning’. Gender, then, is ‘not something a person has, but something that a person does’.
Also, it’s not a result of what people are, but a result of the way they talk and what they do.
As Cameron and Kulick argue, ‘the relationship between language and gender is almost
always indirect, mediated by something else’. The ways that people speak are associated with particular roles, activities and personality traits.
All of them become associated in a particular culture with being gendered lead to these ways
of speaking and indexing a particular gender in the same way through which other ways of speaking may index a person’s social class or ethnic identity.
The features of language use which do this are not at a single level such as a particular vowel quality, choice of vocabulary item, grammatical structure or language variety.
The use of language may be in part intentional and in part habitual.
Identity is not something that is pre-assigned in fixed social categories, but is something that emerges in practice, through the use of discourse.
Also, a person may have multiplicity of identities or personae which may be played all at the same time but at different levels. One or more of these identities may be shown in different times and
for different conscious or unconscious reasons. Different aspects of identity may be inseparable
from each other. Cameron talks about a process of styling the call center male and female workers are trained to use what is thought of as a feminine communication style and expressive intonation
to project rapport and to establish empathy with their callers. The worker’s supervisors, managers and ‘mystery outside callers’ in some cases use checklists as they listen to the workers’ calls
to ensure the training they have been given is producing a particular gendered style of speech.
No way of speaking has only one potential meaning: the meanings it conveys in one context are not necessarily the same ones it conveys in another, and it may also acquire new meanings over time.
Morrish and Saunston and the other contributors to their volume “ New Perspectives on Language and Sexual Identity ” present data which illustrates the interrelationship between language,
gender and sexuality, arguing that both gender and sexuality are inseparable.
In making statements about one, including how it is both performed and constructed through discourse, we are also making statements about the other.
Bucholtz and Hall argue that replacing identity with desire in language and sexuality research is founded on an overly narrow and restrictive vision of what sexuality is, and it misses how
sexuality is negotiated beyond the individual psyche in the social, cultural, and political world.
Discourse and identity
A person may have a number of identities, each of which is more important at different times. One may have an identity as a woman, as a mother, as someone’s partner and as an office worker,
for example. The ways in which people display their identities includes the way they use language
and the way they interact with people. Identities are not natural, instead they are constructed through the use of discourse. They’re not fixed and remain the same throughout a person’s life.
It is something that is constantly constructed and re-constructed as people interact with each other. Part of having a certain identity is that it is recognized by other people.
Identity, thus, is a two-way construction.
The earliest studies into the relationship between language and identity looked at the relationship between social variables such as social class in terms of variation in the use of linguistic variables.
More recent work seen identity ‘as something that is in constant process’ arguing that it is through language or discourse, that identity is principally forged.
The information a person ‘gives off’ about itself and its identity, depends very much on the context
and the purpose of the discourse. It also depends on the setting of the interaction. Furthermore, it is not just through the performance of identities that they are created,
it is also by the fact that they are recognized by other participants in the interactions.
As Blommaert said, a lot of what happens in the field of identity is done by others, not by oneself.
People speak both in and from a place. Place defines people, both in their own eyes and in the eyes of others as well as attributes certain values to their interactions. People can he argues, shift places
frequently and delicately, and each time, in very minimal ways, express different identities.
Thomas has explored the issues of language and identity in online chat environments.
With a focus on adolescent ‘cybergirls’, she examines how girls use words and images to establish online identities which reflect both their fantasies and their desires in this particular setting.
In their online environment, the cybergirls interacted with words, symbols for words, as well as various other symbols such as emoticons and ‘avatars’.
The identities that people establish online, shows how people create identities through their use
of language that may, in some cases, be separate and distinct from their offline identity. Each of these identities is part of the ongoing process of establishing who we are, and who we want
Ch. 3 – What is pragmatics?
Pragmatics is the study of meaning in relation to the context in which a person is speaking or writing. This includes social and textual context and a background knowledge context:
that means what people know about each other and about the world.
Pragmatics looks at people communicating with each other and following some kind of cooperative principles. Thus, hey have a shared understanding of how they should cooperate in their
communications. The ways in which people do this, however, varies across cultures. What may be a culturally appropriate way of saying or doing something in one culture
may not be the same in another culture.
The study of this use of language across cultures is called cross-cultural pragmatics.
Language, context and discourse
How language functions in context is central to understand the relationship between what is said
and what is understood in spoken and written discourse.
The context of situation of what someone says makes difficult to understand the meaning of what is being said. This includes the physical context, the social context and the mental worlds and roles
of the people involved in the interaction. The linguistic context in terms of what has been said and what is yet to be said in the discourse also
has an impact on the intended meaning and how someone may interpret this meaning.
There are, then, a number of key aspects of context that are crucial to the production and interpretation of discourse. These are the situational context in terms of ‘ what people know about
what they can see around them ’, the background knowledge context in terms of ‘ what people know about each other and the world ’ and the co-textual context in terms of ‘ what people
know about what they have been saying ’.
Background knowledge context includes cultural knowledge and interpersonal knowledge. That is, it includes what people know about the world, what they know about various areas of
life , what they know about each other and what they know about the norms and expectations of the particular discourse community in which the communication is taking place.
Contextual knowledge also includes social, political and cultural understandings that are relevant
to the particular communication.
Speech acts and discourse
Two influential works in the area of pragmatics relevant to the area of discourse analysis are
Austin’s How to Do Things With Words and Searle’s Speech Acts.
Austin and Searle argued that language is used to ‘do things’ other than just refer to the truth or falseness of that particular statements.
Basing on a logical positivist view, language is always used to describe some fact or state of affairs, and unless a statement can be tested for truth or falsity it is basically meaningless.
Austin and Searle observed that there are many things that we say which cannot meet these kinds
of truth conditions but which are valid and which do things that go beyond their literal meaning.
They argued that in the same way that we perform physical acts, we also perform acts by using
language. That is, we use language to give orders, to make requests, to give warnings or to give advice.
A central issue which underlies this is the relationship between the literal meaning of what someone says and what the person intends by what he/she says. Thus, if someone says ‘It’s hot in here’,
he’s not only referring to the temperature, he may also be requesting someone to do something
such as ‘turn on the air conditioning’. Austin argued that there are three kinds of acts which occur with everything we say:
The locutionary act refers to the literal meaning of the actual words;
The illocutionary act refers to the speaker’s intention in uttering the words;
The perlocutionary act refers to the effect this utterance has on the thoughts
or actions of the other person.
Direct and indirect speech acts
We often intend something that is quite different from the literal meaning of what we say.
For example a common expression on an invitation to a party is ‘to bring a plate’.
This may, to someone who is not familiar with this kind of cultural convention, be interpreted as a request to bring an empty plate to the party. In fact, it is asking someone to bring food to the party,
not necessarily on a plate.
Felicity conditions and discourse
An important notion in speech act theory is the concept of felicity conditions. For a speech act to ‘work’, Austin argued that there are different conditions that must be agree with.
- The first of these is that there must be a procedure for successfully carrying out the speech act,
such as inviting someone to a wedding through the use of a formal written wedding invitation,
rather than an informal email message;
- Also the circumstances must be appropriate for the use of the speech act, that is someone must be
getting married. The person who uses the speech act must be the appropriate person to use it in the particular context, who can be the bride or the groom, inviting the person to the wedding;
3)The person performing the speech act must have the required thoughts, feelings and intentions for
the speech act to be ‘felicitous’. That is, the communication must be carried out by the right person, in the right place, at the right time and with a certain intention or it will not ‘work’.
If the first two of these conditions are not satisfied, the act will not be achieved and will ‘misfire’. If the third of these conditions does not hold, then the procedure will be ‘abused’.
Rules versus principles
Searle took Austin’s work, arguing that the felicity conditions of an utterance are ‘constitutive
rules’. That is, they are not just something that can ‘go right’ or wrong or be ‘abused’, but something which makes up and defines the act itself.
Thus, there are rules that need to be followed for the utterance to work.
Thomas critiques this notion of constitutive rules and points out that it is very difficult
some kind of cooperative principle must be assumed to be in operation.
There is a set of principles which direct us to a particular interpretation of what someone says, unless we receive some indication to the contrary.
The cooperative principle says we should aim to make our conversational contribution, basing on how it’s required, where and what are the stages at which it occurs, the purpose of the
exchange in which we are engaged, etc. Thus, when someone is speaking to us, we base our
understanding of what they are saying on the assumption that they show the reasons why they say what needs to be said. Grice based his cooperative principle on four maxims:
- According to the maxim of quality , people should say only what they believe to be true;
- The maxim of quantity requires to shape our contribution on the particular purpose and not to
make it more informative than is requie;
The maxim of relation says that our contribution must be relevant to the interaction and indicate in what way it is not;
His maxim of manner asks us to be clear in what we say, being brief and orderly in our contribution to the interaction.
Flouting the cooperative principle
Sometimes a speaker flouts the cooperative principle and intends his hearer to understand this.
So he purposely do not observe the maxims, making the hearer aware of this.
Differences between flouting and violating maxims
Thomas and Cutting discuss differences between flouting and violating maxims. A speaker is flouting a maxim if he doesn’t observe it but has no intention of misleading the other
person; Instead, he’s ‘violating’ a maxim if it seems like they’re misleading the other person. Generally, the speaker intends the hearer to understand something other than the truth.
He may also fail to observe a maxim with no intention to deceive,
such as where a speaker doesn’t have the linguistic capacity to answer a question. He, further, decide to ‘opt out’ of a maxim, such as where a speaker may,
for ethical or legal reasons, refuse to say something that breaches a confidentiality agreement they have.
Overlaps between maxims
There is also often overlap between each of Grice’s maxims.
An utterance may flout the maxims of quality and quantity at the same time. However, it may be acceptable to flout a maxim as a matter of tact and politeness,
It is important, then, for both the production and interpretation of spoken and written discourse
to understand to how people follow the maxims.
Cross-cultural pragmatics and discourse
The ways in which people perform speech acts and what they mean when they perform them,
often varies across cultures.
For example, a Japanese who had the work done by an english speaking local builder,
no matter how much he pressed the issue, he could not convince the builder to apologize.
However, he realized that if this was drawn from an apology in English rather than an apology in Japanese, it would be due to the different implications.
In English, the apologizing would mean that both could assume responsibility for the job and agree to do something about it a situation the builder was most likely keen to do avoid.
In Japan, the an apology would not necessarily have had these implications.
Communication across cultures
Different languages and cultures often have different ways of dealing with pragmatic issues. Be´al found in a communication in the workplace study that communication difficulties occurred
between English and French speakers because the English speakers saw questions,
such as ‘How are you?’ as examples of ‘phatic’ communication and expected short, standard answers, such as ‘Fine thanks’;
the French speakers, instead, saw the questions as ‘real’ requests for information and seem to flout the maxim of quantity, by talking at length about their health.
Cross-cultural pragmatics
As Wierzbicka points out, different pragmatic norms reflect different cultural values which are,
reflected in what people say and what they intend to say in different cultural settings. According to the example of thanking in Japanese and English, in English to thank someone means
to say we feel good towards him because of something good he has done and we want him to feel
good in return. But in Japanese culture, which stress moral duty and the repayment of favours, it’s quite different. However, in this case, a debt not yet repaid calls for an apology from the debtor.
Apologizing, thus, for a Japanese speaker is one way of expressing indebtedness, and thanking someone.
Conversational implicature and discourse
Conversational implicature, for both the production and interpretation of discourse, refers to
the inference a hearer makes about a speaker’s intended meaning that arises from their use of the literal meaning of what the speaker said, the conversational principle and its maxims.
As Thomas explains, an implicature ‘is generated on purpose by the speaker and may be
understood by the hearer’. An inference , on the other hand, is produced not in the same way as well as what a speaker intends.
Furthermore, to calculate an implicature, hearers draw on the conventional meanings of words, the cooperative principle and its maxims, the linguistic and non-linguistic context of the utterance
and items of background knowledge are all available to both participants.
Conventional and particularized conversational implicatures
Grice describes three kinds of conversational implicature:
- With conventional implicatures , no particular context is required in order to derive
the implicature;
- Particularized conversational implicatures are derived from a particular context, rather than from the use of the words alone;
but be much less an expression of intimacy and rapport than it might be in an English speaking
country.
Politeness and gender
Politeness strategies have also been shown to vary according to gender.
Holmes shows differences in the use of politeness strategies between men and women. Women’s work reveals that the relationship between sex, politeness and language is a complex one
and that while research shows that women are more polite than men, it also depends on what we mean by ‘polite’, as well as which kind of women and men’s attitudes are being compared
and what setting to practice the interaction occurs.
This communities of practice view of politeness and gender is also discussed by Christie. Christie looks at politeness and gender in parliamentary debate in the United Kingdom.
Here, while there are many instances of men and women publicly criticizing, ridiculing and challenging each other in parliamentary debates, these are not so much instances of gender
specific impoliteness, but rather politic verbal behaviour.
However, the ways they talk, the ways they do things and their common knowledges, values and beliefs emerge and develop as they carry out their activities.
Researchers in the area of linguistic politeness argue for a communities of practice view of politeness; that is, an examination of the ways in which politeness is typically expressed,
its function and what it means, in the particular social and communicative setting, place and time.
Politeness and cross-cultural pragmatic failure
It is important to remember that the particular nature of face varies across cultures and that politeness strategies are not necessarily universal. Equally, what may be a face-threatening act in
one culture may not be seen the same way in another.
A lack of understanding of ways of expressing politeness in different languages and cultures can be a cause of cross-cultural pragmatic failure , that means pragmatic or grammatic errors
in cross-cultural communication contexts. Matsumoto argues that the use of deference in Japanese is an indication of social register and
relationship and not a politeness strategy; Gu and Mao observe that the politeness model doesn’t
suit Chinese. Instead, while politeness may be a universal phenomenon, what actually counts is culture-specific and language-specific.
Clearly, the ways in which politeness is expressed is not the same across languages and cultures and might mean different things in different linguistic and cultural settings.
Even though people may draw on similar notions such as face, there may be gradations
of politeness in terms of the importance of involvement, independence, tact and modesty in the particular setting.
Ch. 4 – Discourse and Genre
Genres are activities that people engage in through the use of language.
Academic lectures and casual conversations are examples of spoken genres; newspaper reports and academic essays are examples of written genres.
They often have a common function and purpose.
Genres may typically be performed by a particular person aimed at a particular audience, such as an academic lecture being delivered by a lecturer to a group of undergraduate students.
Genres change through time. This may be in response to changes in technologies or in values, in order to underline the use of the particular genre.
The office memo is an example of a genre that has changed in response to technological changes.
An office meeting may change when a new person takes over chairing the meeting who has a different idea from their predecessor as to how the meeting should be run,
what is important to discuss and how this should be discussed.
Defining genre
Martin ’s definition of genre as a staged, goal-oriented, purposeful activity in which speakers engage as members of our culture , means that:
It’s social because we participate in genres with other people;
it’s goal-oriented because we use genres to get things done;
it’s staged because it usually takes us a few steps to reach our goals.
Swales from the field of English for specific purposes says he prefers the notion of ‘ metaphor ’ for talking about genres, rather than ‘ definition ’, saying that definitions are often not true in all
possible worlds and all possible times and can prevent us from seeing new emerging genres for what they really are.
Miller ’s notion of ‘ genre as social action ’ has been especially important in the area known as
rhetorical genre studies. In this view, a genre is defined, not in terms of the substance or the form of discourse but on the action it is used to accomplish.
Genre, thus, is a kind of ‘ social agreement ’ about ways of doing things with language in particular social and cultural settings. Miller also discusses the notion of typification in relation to genre.
That is, there are typical forms a genre might take and typical action that the genre performs,
all of which we recognize and draw on as we engage with the use of genres.
Genre analysis and English for specific purposes
The approach to genre analysis is based on Swales ’ analyses of the discourse structure of research
article introductions. Swales use the notion of ‘ moves ’ to describe the discourse structure of texts
and argued that communicative purpose was the key factor that leads a person to decide whether a text is an instance of a particular genre or not.
Genres may have multiple purposes and that these may be different for each of the participants involved. Also, instances of a genre which are similar linguistically and rhetorically may have
differences in communicative purpose.
Rhetorical genre studies
Researchers describe genres as part of the social processes by which knowledge about reality of the world are made. Genres, in this view, both respond to and contribute to the constitution
of social contexts, as well as the socialization of individuals.
Genres, then, are more than just socially embedded; they are socially constructive. Miller argues that genres serve as keys to understanding how to participate in the actions of a
final assessments that are required of them. We also need to find out more about the genres they
take part in as they prepare for these assessments.
Cope carried out an analysis of the genres that students must interact with in order to apply for admission to colleges. The students, as she noted, engaged in a wide range of spoken and written
genres each of which was interconnected with the other.
Genre knowledge, therefore, includes understanding the totality of genres available in a particular field, how these genres interact with each other, which genera a person might choose to perform a
particular task, etc.
An example of a genre chain: Letters to the editor
Letters to the editor provide a useful example of genre chains as they often invoke or presuppose knowledge of other genres and other previous events.
They can refer to another example of the same genre, such as a previous letter to the editor, or a series of different genres. Sally Sartain, in one of her letters, refers to a review of a restaurant
published in a previous edition of the same newspaper. In an article, related to the context, a
journalist writes about an occasion where the reviewer was refused entry to a restaurant due to his damning review.
The letter to the editor, then, is clearly more than just a reaction to a single text. It is a reaction to a series of previous texts and events. Each of these texts interacts with each other
within their particular gender network. Looking at the lyrics in isolation they remove themselves
from this context and remove much of the information needed for further information to be interpreted in order to integrate it into the texts and make a judgment about them.
An example of a genre network
A genre network shows genres outside of the typical ones that student researchers might believe
they need in order to be successful in their graduate studies. The sequence in which they take part in these genres may vary and may not necessarily be the same for every student,
but they are part of a typical repertoire of genre demands for many student researchers.
Written genres across cultures
The area of research known as contrastive rhetoric , which examines the use of genres across cultures, also has implications for discussions of genre.
Generally, rhetoric focuses on the discourse structure of academic writing in different languages and cultures. Contrastive rhetoric has its origins in the work of Kaplan , who examined different
patterns in students' academic essays, written in different languages.
Although Kaplan has since revised his strong claim that academic differences written in different languages is the result of culturally different ways of thinking.
Other studies, however, have found important similarities in the discourse structure of academic writing across cultures.
Cahill argues that in Chinese and Japanese nonfiction, for example, the structure of discourse is not always as different from writing essays in English as is sometimes assumed. The typical structure of
speech also applies to English, so we must try to reduce it to a single type of speech with a single
norm, then generalizing the cultural characteristics drawn from specific examples.
Leki argues that many stylistic and discursive devices that are typical of other languages, also occurs in certain contexts in English.
Likewise, features said to be typical of English writing appear, at times, in others
languages too. Contrastive rhetoric, in that case, can usefully be seen not as a study of culture-specific thought patterns, but as a study of differences or preferences in the pragmatic
choices that writers make in response to external demands and cultural stories.
Canagarajah argues that contrastive rhetoric needs to develop more complex types of explanation
for textual difference. Gender analysis, thus, can help provide some of them of this explanation, as long as it stays away
from genre-specific discursive models.
Spoken genres across cultures
Much less attention has been paid to differences in spoken genres between cultures. An interesting study is Nakanishi 's examination of going on the first date in Japanese,
which in his study mostly meant having dinner with someone in order to get to know them better. Nakanishi was particularly interested to the way Japanese men and women behaved during and at
the end of the first date, but also to the typical sequence of events that lead to the creation and
closure of this genre in Japanese. He observed that women avoid silence during the date and ask many questions to find out more
about their partners and expressed theirs ideas and feelings. This was particularly interesting because in other genres silence is acceptable in Japanese.
If Japanese women had remained silent, the date would not have been a success.
Their behavior is typical of what someone familiar with Japanese culture and communication styles might do.
Genre and academic writing
The notion of genre is fundamental to the teaching of academic writing, but in different ways
in different parts of the world. In Britain and the United States, for example, work on English gender for specific purposes focuses primarily on graduate students writing in a second language.
In Australia, on the other hand, it has had a negative impact and a different focus. This, in part, stems from the Australian labor concern of empower disadvantaged members
of the community and provide them with the resources necessary for academic success.
While he initially focused on writing in elementary school and secondary school environments, Australian gender work now he has moved on to writing in higher education too.
Academic speech and writing
Many of the analyzes of the discourse structure of academic texts have been carried out
by Swales, who has examined, for example, the discourse structures of research articles, master's
