Genres, registers, text types, domains and styles: Clarifying the concepts and nevigating a path through the bnc jungle

Genres, Registers, Text Types, Domains, and Styles

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thought of as genres or vice versa. Indeed, sharp-eyed readers will have noted that recipes are included

under both register and genre.

Coming back to the systemic-functional approach, it will be noted that even among subscribers to the

"genre-based" approach in language pedagogy (Cope & Kalantzis, 1993), opinions differ on the definition

and meaning of genre. For J. R. Martin, as we have seen, genre is above and beyond register, whereas for

Gunther Kress, genre is only one part of what constitutes his notion of register (a superordinate term).

The following diagram illustrates his use of the terms:

Figure 3. Elements of the composition of text (Kress, 1993, p. 35)

Kress (1993) appears to dislike the fact that genre is made to carry too much baggage or different strands

of information:

There is a problem in using such a term [genre] with a meaning that is relatively

uncontrollable. In literary theory, the term has been used with relative stability to

describe formal features of a text -- epitaph, novel, sonnet, epic -- although at times

content has been used to provide a name, [e.g.] epithalamion, nocturnal, alba. In screen

studies, as in cultural studies, labels have described both form and content, and at times

other factors, such as aspects of production. Usually the more prominent aspect of the

text has provided the name. Hence "film noir"; "western" or "spaghetti western" or

"psychological" or "Vietnam western"; "sci-fi"; "romance"; or "Hollywood musical"; and

similarly with more popular print media. (pp. 31-2)

In other words, Kress is complaining about the fact that

a great complex of factors is condensed and compacted into the term -- factors to do with

the relations of producer and audience, modes of production and consumption, aesthetics,

histories of form and so on. (p. 32)

He claims that many linguists, educators, and literacy researchers, especially those working within the

Australian-based "genre theory/school" approach, use the term in the same all-encompassing way. Also,

he is concerned that the work of influential people like Martin and Rothery has been focussed too much

on presenting ideal generic texts and on the successive "unfolding" of "sequential stages" in texts (which

are said to reflect the social tasks which the text producers perform; Paltridge, 1995, 1996, 1997):

The process of classification … seems at times to be heading in the direction of a new

formalism, where the 'correct' way to write [any particular text] is presented to students in

the form of generic models and exegeses of schematic structure. (Kress, 1993, p. 12)

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David Lee

Genres, Registers, Text Types, Domains, and Styles

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Those familiar with Kress' work in critical discourse analysis (e.g., Kress & Hodge, 1979) should not be

surprised to learn, however, that in his approach to genre the focus is instead:

… on the structural features of the specific social occasion in which the text has been

produced [, seeing] these as giving rise to particular configurations of linguistic factors in

the text which are realisations of, or reflect, these social relations and structures [,…e.g.]

who has the power to initiate turns and to complete them, and how relations of power are

realised linguistically. In this approach "genre" is a term for only a part of textual

structuring, namely the part which has to do with the structuring effect on text of sets of