Text typology

Excerps from Anna Trosbor. 1997. Text Typology: Register, Genre and Text Type. Text Typology and Translation: 3-23. John Benjamins

Text typology
register, genre and text type
Which categories can be used to classify and explain ways in which types of discourse may be accounted for? Terminological problems concerning the distinction of text, discourse, register, genre, text type, discourse purpose, communicative purpose, rhetorical purpose and communicative function will be dealt with. A framework comprising a classifiction into registers and genres, with communicative function and text type as crucial categories within a discourse framework of field, tenor and mode will be suggested.
Text types
Virtanen (1990) has studied the difference in terminology use:

Trosborg (1997) proposes to use them interchangeably.
Text types cutting across registers and genres
Genre distinctions do not adequately represent the underlying text functions of English. Genres and texts types must be distinguished.

While genres form an open-ended set (Schauber and Spolsy 1986), text types constitute a closed set with only a limited number of categories (also Chafe 1982, who proposes a four-way classification of texts, 'involvement-detachment' and 'integration-fragmentation').

The relationship between text types and genres is not straightforward.

• Genres reflect differences in external format and situations of use, and are defined on the basis of systematic non-linguistic criteria.
• Text types may be defined on the basis of cognitive categories or linguistic criteria.

Biber captures the salient linguistic differences among texts in English (see also Longacre 1976, 1982, and Smith 1985).
For 2,400 years there have been two traditions of classifying texts:

While communicative purpose is the aim of a text, rhetorical purpose is made up of strategies which constitute the mode of discourse realized through text types.
Text types are "a conceptual framework which enables us to classify texts in terms of communicative intentions serving an overall rhetorical purpose" (Hatim and Mason 1990:140).
Communicative functions

Speech acts

Austin (1962) declared that speakers do not simply produce sentences that are true or false, but rather perform speech actions such as requests, warnings, assertions, etc. Searle (1969) adopted Grice's (1957) recognition of intention to his effort to specify the necessary conditions on the performance of speech acts.
Text pragmatics studies how sequences of speech acts are evaluated on the basis of higher order expectations about the text, and how these sequences of coherent microtexts contribute to the global coherence of a larger text (Ferrara 1985).
Text act
Text act: the predominant illocutionay force of sequences of speech acts must be recognized (Hatim and Mason 1990, Horner 1975).
Context focus
No theory of modes of discourse is rigid in its categorization, multiple views of reality and multiple types (Kinneavy 1980). Pure narration, description, exposition and argumentation hardly occur. A particular genre may make use of several modes of presentation. Text type focus or contextual focus refers to text type at the macro level, the dominant function of a text type in a text (Morris 1946, Werlich 1976, HM 1990, Virtanen 1992 'discourse type').
Two-level typology of text types and communicative functions:

• at the macrolevel of discourse, text type may be assumed to precede the level of text-strategic choices, thus affecting the whole strategy of the text
• the choice of microlevel text type has to do with the textualization process, which is determined by the text producer's text strategy

Text types employed in a particular text (or genre) need not agree with its contextual focus. An argumentative text-type focus may be realized through narration, instructions may take the form of description, etc.
There is interaction between communicative purspose and rhetorical purpose (text type), eg. to persuade it is possible to narrate, describe, argue.

Genre
Genres reflect differences in external format and situations of use, and are defined on the basis of systematic non-linguistic criteria.

Registers are divided into genres refelcting the way social purposes are accomplished in and through them in settings in which they are used. Bathia (1993:17) points out a science research article is an instance of scientific language as is an extract from a chemistry lab report.

In the case of restricted registers there is a close connection between register and genre, eg. weather forecasts.
Genre is a macrolevel concept, a communicative act within a discourseive network:
... repertoires of typified social responses in recurrent situations -from greetings to thank yous to acceptance speeches and full-blown, written expositions of scientific investigations - genres are use to package speech and make it recognizable to the exigencies of the situation (Berkenkotter & Huckin (1995)

The stuty of texts as genres, "how texts are perceived, categorized and used by members of a community" (Swales 1990:42), has attracted little attention from Linguistics (eg. Frow 1980), until the Systemic school put hands on it.
Rhetorical scholars have given genre a more central place, recently focused on social constitution of nonliterary forms of writing and speaking. Ethnographers concern about which labels are used to type communications, in order to reveal elements of verbal communication which are sociolinguistically salient (Saville-Troike 1982). In the field of LSP there has been growing interest in the sociocultural functions of disciplinary genres, eg. legal and scientific communication:

• medical English (Maher 1986)
• legal English (Bhatia 1987)

Communicative purpose as the defining criterion of genre
For some scholars genres are defined on the basis

• of external criteria: newspaper articles in newspapers, etc. (Biber 1989:6)
• of communicative purpose or luinguistic content and form (Swales 1990, Bhatia 1993, Berkenkotter & Huckin 1995, Bhatia 1995)

Swales emphasizes the socio-rhetorical context of genre, the categories are those of the community, and communicative purpose is the defining criterion. Genre as a social action operates as a mechanism to clarifying what communicative goals are.

• instances of genres vary in their prototypicality with the community's nomenclature for genres
• discourse community, genre and task are bound by communicative purpose
• according to Swales 1990:10, communicative purpose
• drives language activities of a discourse community
• is the prototypical criterion for genre identity
• operates as the primary determinant of tasks

A multi-dimensional approach to genre
Unclear relation between genre and register (Ventola 1984). Is genre a system underlying register? For Trosborg (1997) it is not.

Trosborg (1997) sees genres as having complementary registers. Communicative success of a text may require appropriate combinations of genre and register (Couture 1986). In agreement with the stand taken by Swales (1990), Bhatia (1993) takes genre analysis form linguistic description to explanation: Why do members of a specialist community write the way they do? Berkenkotter & Huckin (1995) develop a sociocognitive theory of genre, which Trosborg (1997) applies as an explanatory approach to hybrid political texts from the EU.
Genres cannot be identified by communicative purpose, eg. poetic genres aimed at giving verbal pleasure defy ascripton of communicative purpose. Medium of communication may also be decisive: memos, emails, faxes.
Model: texts form part of communicative situations. Hallidays (1971) functional approach with three-fold division (used by Vermeer, Nord, Hatim & Mason 1990, and Baker 1992 for translation, and by Bhatia 1993 for SPL).

• field: ideational component covering linguistic content
• tenor: interpersonal component covering communicative functions in relation to sender/receiver roles
• mode: textual component involving medium, channel and nature of participation

A genre can only be accounted through a specification of field, tenor and mode and a description of the linguistic features realized in the ideational, inerpersonal and textual components of particular texts (Eggins 1994). Kussmaul 1997 shows how a change of a single parameter may result in a change of genre.

Register
Varieties of language use have been referred to as registers (Reid 1956, Halliday et al. 1964)
Halliday et al. 1964 divided language into

These are some approaches to the study of register:

• Register as a functional language variation is a "contextual category correlating groupings of linguistic features with recurrent situational features" (Gregory & Carroll 1978:4).
• Frequency of lexico-grammatical features show sub-codes of particular text-varieties (Crystal & Davy 1969, Gregory & Carrool 1978).
• Frequencies of syntactic poperties provide evidence of diverencies of language variation (Barber 1962, Crystal & Davy 1969, Gustaffsson 1975).
• Some specific linguistic features have restricted values in scientific communication, eg. pre-modifying en-participles textualize two different aspects of chemestry text depending upon whether the author is exemplifying or generalizing (Swales 1990:41). This shows a relation between grammatical choices and rhetorical functions, i.e. communicative functions (Lackstrom, Selinker & Trimble 1973, Swales 1981, Trimble 1985).
• The collocation of two or more lexical items, rather than the occurrence of isolated items determines the identity of a given register.
• Conscious stylistic choices made by language users in different situation type. A situation type includes any number of situations (tokens) of the general type, eg. making your next appointment with the dentist is a particular token of a recognized type of situation.s (Halliday et al. 1964, Hatim & Mason 1990)

Trosborg (1997) concludes that register is too broad a notion. Focusing on the language of a field, register analysis disregards differences of genres within the field. Labels such as legal English are misleading and overprivilege a homogeneity of content at the expense of variation in communicative purpose, addresser-addresee relationships and genre conventions (Swales 1990:3).
In order to understand how texts organize informationally, rhetorically and stylistically, there is the need of other considerations on top of pure textual evidence.
Inappropriate usages of the term register:

• 'employer register', focusing on tenor (Werlich 1976)
• 'written register', adjusted to mode (Schleppegrell 1996)

Main references
Vijay K. Bhatia. 1993. Analysing Genre. Language use in professional settings. Longman.
Douglas Biber. 1989. A Typology of English Texts. Linguistics 27: 3-43.
James L. Kinneavy. 1980. A Theory of Discourse. Norton.
M.A. K. Halliday & R. Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. Longman
Basil Hatim & Ian Mason. 1990. Discourse and the Translator. Longman.
John M. Swales. 1990. Genre Analysis. English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press.

John M. Swales. 2000. Further Reflections on Genre and ESL Academic Writing. Symposium on Second Language Writing. West Lafayette, Indiana, USA September 15-16, 2000
Although many would likely concur with Bakhtin's dictum that "The better our command of genres, the more freely we employ them," operationally genre remains a disputed framework for ESL writing courses and approaches. Controversies polarize around repression versus expression, individual voice versus conventionalized pattern, imitative play versus contextual realpolitik, specific guidelines versus general principles, and cultural subordination versus cultural resistance. Recent work confirms the contested nature of the theoretical ground. On the one hand, Johns (2000) offers several example of genre-based approaches in effective action; on the other hand, Freedman (2000) questions whether EAP instructors can sufficiently escape their own classroom contexts to offer real assistance with the genres of the wider academy. In this presentation, I discuss these controversies through the lens of new advanced materials for NNS graduate students (Swales & Feak, 2000) premised on cross-disciplinary "difference," participant disciplinary analysis, genre systems, and a task taxononmy privileging rhetorical reflection. I argue that while border crossings may be hazardous with undergraduate "school genres," and certainly in preparing students for writing at work (Freedman, 1993), they are less so in research genres. Reasons for this include the public nature of many research genres, the established evaluative processes that adjudicate them, and student capacity to assess the appropriacy of any advice offered.
http://icdweb.cc.purdue.edu/~silvat/symposium/2000/keynote.html#swales