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

complex social relations between consumers and producers of texts. [all italics added] (p.

33)

As can be seen, therefore, there is a superficial terminological difference in the way genre is used by

some theorists, but no real, substantive disagreement because they both situate it within the broader

context of situational and social structure. While genre encompasses register and goes "above and

beyond" it in Martin's (1993, Eggins & Martin, 1997) terms, it is only one component of the larger

overarching term register in Kress' approach. My own preferred usage of the terms comes closest to

Martin's, and will be described below. Before that, however, I will briefly consider two other attempts at

clearing up the terminological confusion.

Sampson (1997) calls for re-definitions of genre, register, and style and the relationships among them, but

his argument is not quite lucid or convincing enough. In particular, his proposal for register to be

recognised as fundamentally to do with an individual's idiolectal variation seems to go against the grain of

established usage, and is unlikely to catch on. Biber (Finegan & Biber, 1994, pp. 51-53; 1995, pp. 7-10)

does a similar survey, looking at the use of the terms register, genre, style, sublanguage, and text type in

the sociolinguistic literature, and despairingly comes to the conclusion that register and genre, in

particular, cannot be teased apart. He settles on register as "the general cover term associated with all

aspects of variation in use" (1995, p. 9), but in so doing reverses his choice of the term genre in his earlier

studies, as in Biber (1988) and Biber & Finegan (1989). (Further, as delineated in Finegan & Biber, 1994,

Biber also rather controversially sees register variation as a very fundamental basis or cause of social

dialect variation.)

While hoping not to muddy the waters any further, I shall now attempt to state my position on this

terminological issue. My own view is that style is essentially to do with an individual's use of language.

So when we say of a text, "It has a very informal style," we are characterising not the genre to which it

belongs, but rather the text producer's use of language in that particular instance (e.g., "It has a very

quirky style"). The EAGLES (1996) authors are not explicit about their stand on this point, but say they

use style to mean:

the way texts are internally differentiated other than by topic; mainly by the choice of the

presence or absence of some of a large range of structural and lexical features. Some

features are mutually exclusive (e.g. verbs in the active or passive mood), and some are

preferential, e.g. politeness markers and mitigators. (p. 22)

As noted earlier, the main distinction they recommend for the stylistic description of corpus texts is

formal/informal in combination with parameters such as the level of preparation (considered/impromptu),

"communicative grouping" (conversational group; speaker/writer and audience; remote audiences) and

"direction" (one-way/interactive). This chimes with my suggestion that we should use the term style to

characterise the internal properties of individual texts or the language use by individual authors, with

"formality" being perhaps the most important and fundamental one. Joos's (1961) five famous epithets

"frozen," "formal," "informal," "colloquial," and "intimate" come in handy here, but these are only

suggestive terms, and may be multiplied or sub-divided endlessly, since they are but five arbitrary points

on a sliding scale. On a more informal level, we may talk about speakers or writers having a "humorous,"

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David Lee