ANTHONY PYM
TEXT GENRES IN ENGLISH
TEXT AND GENRE
Aim: To introduce the concept of text genre and to locate its theoretical status. Tasks with
simple genres (recipes and horoscopes) should enable students to grasp the importance of the
concept. By the end of the lessons students should be able to describe rules and guidelines for
such simple genres.
Preliminary task
The class writes instructions on how to make an omelet. They will usually start “First, you have
to get...”. Then show actual cases of such instructive texts, where English uses the imperative
and, increasingly, iconic instructions. Discuss the reasons why full sentences tend not to be
used in these cases.
The nature of text genres
Genres are nowadays meant to be “specific classes of texts characteristic of a given scientific
community or professional group and distinguished from each other by certain features of
vocabulary, form and style, which are wholly function-specific and conventional in nature”
(Alcaraz and Hughes).
This would mean such things as recipes, song lyrics, business letters or legal contracts. True
enough, knowing how to use a language involves recognizing when a piece of text belongs to
one or other of these genres. The phrase “Add one teaspoon of....” would not normally be
associated with the phrase “The parties hereto...”. One would expect the first to be found in a
recipe and the second to be found in a contract. To the extent that such expectations exist, we
might assume that text genres exist. Or better, the operation of the genre is in the expectation
itself. With this proviso, if we happen to get a text that says “The parties hereto hereby agree to
add one teaspoon of sugar each...”, we need not throw up our hands and pronounce the theory
of genre dead and inapplicable. The notion of genre does not say, obviously, that the first part of
a text must always be followed by the same second part. It simply says that there is some such
expectation, and when that expectation is defeated, as is the case here, the effect is in some
way meaningful. Here the effect might be ironic, or parodic, or at least non-serious. And that
effect is achieved because genres exist. We will return to the importance of such implicatures
below.
So far we have located genres as facts of expectation. This expectation might fairly be located
in the mind of the receiver of a text. And yet it surely also exists in the mind of the producer, at
least to the extent that the text producer envisages how the text is to be received (I expect that
you will expect that..., and so on). There is no particular reason why genre theory should be
positioned more on one side than the other. Similarly, the genres we are interested in concern
oral as well as written texts, since mixes of orality and writtenness are one of the aspects that
we will expressly be investigating. More important perhaps is our initial restriction of the nature
of what is expected. Here we will limit ourselves more or less to features that are in the text as a
linguistic or perilinguistic product.
Imagine, for example, that your boyfriend swears at you but you nevertheless interpret this as
an expression of love because you know your boyfriend’s peculiar personality very well (some
people are like that). That is good for you, but bad for us, since the entire aspect of that peculiar
personality is absent from the text (we only see him swearing). Looking at the text, we would
have to operate the genre of ‘abuse’ rather than of ‘love’. True, our external preferences will not
take us deep into the hidden mysteries of intimate situations. Our art remains in the external
world of social convention, looking merely at what is there for all to see. In the same vein, we
are talking here about ‘text’ rather than ‘discourse’ because, much as these two terms are
confused and conflated, we are primarily interested in what is there, in the linguistic features
woven together in a text, rather than the often vaguer senses of discourses as ‘ways of
speaking’, or even more or less coherent modes of thought.
Here we enter a more contentious point of definition. We have said that genres comprise
features that are “wholly function-specific and conventional in nature”. This could imply that a
specific set of features belongs to one genre and to no other. What we find in a recipe will not
be found in a contract, and viceversa, except in cases of weak English or light-heartedness.
This is actually saying quite a lot. After all, beyond extreme mismatches such as recipes vs.
contracts, a text will usually contain elements that can also be found in other texts, with quite
different functions. Further, since genres change historically, surely they cannot be “wholly
conventional in nature”? Considerations like this underlie Bakhtin’s claim that genres (speech
genres in his case) are fundamentally dialogic rather than monologic. They may also be found
in Hatim and Mason’s claim that “all texts are hybrid” (1997: 179). Yes indeed, texts are impure
representations of genres. And yet, if we were to allow that all genres are hybrid, that they all
mix features of each other, all we are really saying is that users of texts expect mixtures. In
other words, that we constantly expect the unexpected, since that is all we are going to get. This
would mean that we effectively have no more genres.
In this course I want to insist that genres are, by definition, not hybrid. Texts can be as mixed
and mosaic as you like, but genres, as expectations, are based on predictable and predicted
regularities. True enough, there are surrealist genres where surprise is the aim, where one does
indeed expect the unexpected. And further genres like instruction manuals translated into
English from Oriental languages, or the English found in cheap non-English hotels, where one
once expected not to be able to understand very much (although those expectations are now
regularly defeated). There is really no logical hurdle involved in accepting the existence of such
things. But if our definitions are to be operative, we should be prepared to insist that, as a pure
matter of definition, the expectations we want to talk about involve norm-based associations,
regularities, conventions and the like (no need to sort out these terms at this stage). When the
expectation is of surprise or opacity, that is in itself reason for the recognition of specific genres.
There is thus no a priori reason to allow that all genres are hybrid.
Does this then defeat any attempt to explain the way text genres change historically? We must
recognize, after all, that the nature of English texts is changing enormously, thanks to electronic
means of communication and the growth of English as an international language. These are
indeed the processes that will be of most interest to us in this course. They ensue from material
expansion, from new modes of contact over vast distances, from the presence of millions of
new users of English. There is, in the international English of the electronic media, a huge
space for exchange between the most diverse cultural groups, and correspondingly enormous
fluidity in genre conventions. In email, in Internet commerce, in satellite television, the English
language is at best feeling its way through uncharted territory. There is, in this space,
considerable temerity in any claim that genres are wholly conventional. And yet we make that
claim. There are several reasons:
First, because the processes involved are not operative with genre expectations themselves. As
we enter the world of email, for example, we might expect “Dear Ms Smith” as the salutation; we
increasingly find “Hi Mary” is thrown at us; soon we are writing “Hi Tom” in reply; anything like
“Dear Ms” now sounds inappropriately formal after the first few exchanges with a person; our
genre expectations have changed. We have in fact moved from the written letter to the spoken
salutation, in this case from international convention to what was once a specifically American
“Hi!”. The crossing from one genre to another is a difficult and tension-ridden business. But it is
a crossing, and is felt as such. Indeed, there should be some sense of relief once we finally
accept that “Hi John” or whatever (I am personally uneasy about adopting it). We accept that,
despite the written mode, what we are doing now is more like speaking that anything else; and
despite the American flavour this “Hi” is a usefully short word, so let’s stay with that. To the
extent that there is that sense of relief, the move from one genre to another is precisely that: the
negotiation of a hybrid middle space, attempting to establish an agreed conventional space. The
genre is the expected or sought convention, not the crossing.
We are clearly not denying the existence of hybridity, historicity, dialogic relations and the like.
Yet here we insist that the world is not automatically made up of such wonderfully progressive
things. Text genres, in our view, are fundamentally conservative. As shall become apparent,
they involve restrictive power relations and more or less entrenched resistance to change.
Genres are profoundly ideological in that they situate communicating subjects and limit their
options. And yet, admittedly, there are degrees of such things, just as there are relative degrees
of security and insecurity in the use of any language variety. Subjects may resist being situated;
they may continue with as many “Dear Sirs” as they can get away with; they may progressively
invent new genres. Yet the genre as such, as expectation, seeks repetition of the same.
The linguistics of genre
English linguistics has turned its attention to the concept of ‘genre’ roughly since the early
1990s, following benchmark studies by Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993). The parallel notion of
‘text type’ has been of some importance in translation studies since the early of Katharina Reiss
(1971), who found a point of departure in Bühler’s study of language functions (1934). Further, if
we trace the origins of the associated theories of discourse, we are drawn back to the work of
linguists in the late nineteenth century, who spent some time explaining things like free indirect
discourse, situated between direct and reported speech. From them we could trace a line
forward in history to the Russian Formalists and Bahktin, and then follow those influences
through structuralism, post-structuralism, and a belated return to the concerns of European
linguistics. Given this broader horizon, one might legitimately ask what is new in genre theory.
If anything is new, it might be a relative lack of dogmatism in these matters. Text linguists - for
whom inclusion in the camp of serious linguistics is of some importance - tend to work bottomup, starting from the smaller observable units and describing how those units fit into larger
segments, with the final unit usually being something like the overall function of the text in
question. Functionalists - more associated with sociolinguistics or literary studies - will tend to
adopt the reverse approach, asking questions top-down. They would thus start with
observations about the way a text operates between senders and receivers, and then see how
certain linguistic features help or hinder the operations.
The functionalists are working top-down. The textualists are working bottom-up. Of course, the
two should meet. But here we should decide which way we want to work in this course.
Discovering genre
If we work top-down, from institution to function to text, genres are relatively easy to describe.
We might for example take the institution of a legal system in which property is recognized; with
that system, contracts are documents expressing an agreement to exchange valuable
consideration; the necessary parts of those texts thus include identification of the parties,
definition of the agreement, and description of the prestations, and identification of the
pertaining laws. That much is easy. If, however, we try to describe the genre on the basis of a
selection of actual texts, we will find enormous variation in the number of parts, in their names,
and in the formulas used. Some are full of “wherewiths” and “heretofors”; others are in relatively
unmarked English; some have traditional forms, others adopt the forms of non-English legal
systems. When we work this way, from the actual texts, we are adopting a ‘bottom-up’
approach. From this perspective, we are likely to be overwhelmed at the many differences
between the texts; we are tempted to become textualists; the wealth of hybridity might win the
day.
If the perspective adopted in this course is thus more bottom-up than anything else, we expect
our findings to disrupt or go beyond the conservative expectations we have associated with
genre. In that sense, we are betting that texts will actually struggle against genres, in ways that
may not be obvious if we were to work exclusively top-down.
Features of a genre
If we assume a text belongs to a genre, the assumption tends to concern features such as the
following:
(a) A communicative function, often indicated by the operative verbs, giving the text a
‘rhetorical purpose’
(b) A common length
(c) A macrostructure (functions and sub-functions)
(d) A similar discursive mode of developing the macrostructure (narrative, descriptive,
imperative, optative), often indicated by the use of personal pronouns
(e) A common lexical and syntactic arrangement of the material and a common set of
functional units and formal features, e.g. in statutes and other legislative texts, the
abundant use of indefinite pronouns, passives and impersonal forms of the verb
(f) Common socio-pragmatic conventions, e.g. the hierarchical structure of forms of
address
(g) Common lexical items.
Genres may be discovered (and undone) by asking questions on all these levels. Such is the
work we will be doing in the first part of this course.
Tasks
1. Using the above list of genre features, describe the features of the recipe genre in
English. Which of these descriptions could be written as rules?
2. Get a selection of horoscope texts for the same day, in English and in other available
languages. In principle, these texts all express a similar referent: the position of the
stars for the day concerned. Working top-down (institution, function, then text), state
what the basic elements of this genre are likely to be. Then, working bottom-up (text,
subject position, variations), se whether the top-down description has to be modified.
3. Write the rules or expectations for the horoscope texts you have collected above.
4. Look up the etymology of the word “genre”. Note its association with ‘gender’ (it is
indeed the same word in German: Gattung). To what extent can gender, in the sense of
cultural sets of sex roles, be seen as operating like text genres? If all genres are hybrid,
can the same be said of genders?
Text genres: “specific classes of texts characteristic
of a given scientific community or professional group
and distinguished from each other by certain features
of vocabulary, form and style, which are wholly
function-specific and conventional in nature” (Alcaraz
and Hughes).
Features of a genre
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
(7)
A communicative function, often indicated
by the operative verbs, giving the text a
‘rhetorical purpose’
A common length
A macrostructure (functions and subfunctions)
A similar discursive mode of developing
the macrostructure (narrative, descriptive,
imperative, optative), often indicated by
the use of personal pronouns
A common lexical and syntactic
arrangement of the material and a
common set of functional units and formal
features, e.g. in statutes and other
legislative texts, the abundant use of
indefinite pronouns, passives and
impersonal forms of the verb
Common socio-pragmatic conventions,
e.g. the hierarchical structure of forms of
address
Common lexical items.