The concept of genre

One of the best known genre theorists in linguistics is John Swales. In his monograph Genre Analysis (1990) Swales takes on the ambitious challenge of defining genre and making sense of

the fuzzy theory surrounding the concept of genre. Swales (1990: 45–58) argues that a genre must fill the following five criteria:

1. A genre is a class of communicative events.

2. The principal criterial feature that turns a collection of communicative events into a genre is some shared set of communicative purposes.

3. Exemplars or instances of genres vary in their prototypicality.

4. The rationale behind a genre establishes constraints on allowable contributions in terms of their content, positioning and form.

5. A discourse community’s nomenclature for genres is an important source of insight.

A communicative event is one where language plays a pivotal, not merely incidental role. So, for example, a telephone conversation is considered a communicative event, whereas ice-skating is not. However, a communicative event does not mean just the language itself, but is consisted of the participants, discourse, the cultural and historical environment of the production and reception of the discourse. These communicative events must, in addition, occur often enough according to their prominence within the society so that they can be thought of as a genre in their own right. Papal Encyclicals occur very rarely but are a genre class, but a TV advertisement with a talking dog is not (Swales 1990: 45–46). Academic research blogs can easily be thought of as a class of communicative events, as language clearly plays a pivotal role in them, and while they are not as prominent within the society as Papal Encyclical, they do occur more often and often enough to constitute a class of communicative events.

The second criteria a class of communicative events has to fill to pass as a genre is to have some shared set of communicative purposes. So, Swales 1990: 46–49) takes the same stance as Miller (1984) in that it is the shared purpose, rather than similar form or content that constitutes a genre. For some genres, for example cooking recipes, identifying the shared set of communicative purposes is straightforward, but to some others it can be somewhat complicated. A good example of this comes from the academic world: the communicative purpose of students’ written examinations can be hard to define, because in most cases the students are not writing essays to tell the reader about the rise and fall of the British Empire, but to show the reader, that is, the teacher, that they have learned the facts they are required to learn during the course. In order to find out if academic research blogs share a set of communicative purposes, I will analyse the communicative purpose of each blog

in the data set of this study and determine whether they form a set, and further, whether they form a class of communicative events.

The third criterion for a genre has to do with the properties and features which have to be present in all of the instances of a certain genre. Instead of a shared list of specific features, the membership of a certain genre seems to be based on quite loose inter-relationships. For instance, a lecture cannot be defined as an event where a teacher teaches students, because an event can still be defined as a lecture even if the teacher sits still without saying a word and students give their peers a presentation. A lecture with a teacher lecturing to the students is, however, more typical a lecture than a lecture consisting only of student presentations. So, the lecture with a lecturing teacher can be considered a prototype lecture, in the similar fashion as an apple is a prototype fruit instead of an olive. Swales (1990: 49–52) notes that whereas communicative purpose is the privileged property of a genre and therefore does not allow for much variation, content, form, structure and audience expectations are less important and thus vary according to the extent to which the instance is prototypical of a certain genre. By analysing and quantifying the structural and linguistic features of the academic research blogs in the study, I expect to find out the prototypical features of academic research blogs and how much variation there is in the prototypicality of the blogs.

The fourth criterion for genre is about the rationale behind the genre. According to Swales (1990: 52–54), the recognition of the shared set of purposes mentioned in the second criteria provides the rationale behind the genre, and this rationale brings about conventions according to the content, positioning and form, and constrains lexical and syntactic choices in the genre. Established members of a discourse community recognise and understand the rationale very well, whereas non-established members are not yet as good at perceiving the rationale. Being a rather novel and non-established genre, I expect to find a lot of variation in the content, positioning and form of academic research blogs.

The fifth and final criterion Swales (1990: 54–57) suggests puts emphasis on the discourse community’s naming practice. As the fourth criteria suggests, established members have greater knowledge of the conventions of a genre than occasional members. These active expert members give genre names to those classes of communicative events they think are producing recurrent rhetorical action.