Corpora: register and genre

[David Lee]

> I would say that you are dealing with two different registers, the
>genre is
> academic prose, but that is probably a very high level genre as the
>styles are probably very different.

[Beverley has now received apparently contradictory advice. (I suggested
calling her groups of texts 'genres' in a previous mail.)]

Geoff: Is there any reason why these two can't be different "genres" (as
well)? You've used 'register', 'genre',  and 'style' in one sentence
(plus 'discourse communities' and 'fields' later on), but have given no
indication of how you distinguish among them.


> If you are dealing with research publications
> your sciences texts will probably follow variations on Swales's IMRD
> model, that would not be the case in Commerce/Economics.

Presumably you are working within the systemic-functional tradition and
have the 'unfolding of stages' as a key criterion for 'register'. If
commerce/economics as a  (subject) 'field' ('domain'? Terminology
galore!) has not yet been established as having a particular GSP or
field-mode-tenor configuration, why assume commerce/economics texts
constitute a (single?) 'register'? My approach would be to view such
texts as forming a more or less coherent genre (on the basis of having a
fairly discernible 'discourse community' with shared interests), with
different kinds of texts within the genre *perhaps* having distinct
'registers' in the SF sense (e.g. financial reports, commercial law
professional guidebooks) and other kinds being essentially formless and
too varied to be 'register-typed' (e.g. economics textbooks).


> One of your first tasks
> will be to define what is prototypical of the genre you are studying
> and also define the discourse communities you intend to look at as
> both the fields you give are very wide


Perhaps what Beverley was looking for was precisely a term which was
capable of describing these very wide fields in some way. I have
suggested 'genre' as an elastic term which assumes nothing (and makes no
claims) about the internal or textual characteristics of the texts, but
merely characterises them in socio-cultural, text-external terms.
('Register', on the other hand, doesn't seem (to me) to have this
elasticity or fuzziness: it tends towards technicality and specificity
because it is defined in terms of specifiable textual features
empirically established (e.g. Halliday & Hasan's Generic Structure
Potential (GSP).) Granted, there are exceptions and problematic genres,
and the more you look into this the messier it gets, but as a working
definition, I think it works.



David Lee