CONTEXT OF CULTURE: GENRE

It was suggested before that taking a systemic functional approach to language involves asking both how people use language, and how language is itself structured for use. In beginning how people use language to achieve culturally appropriate goals, trough the concept of genre. An authentic text can be used to illustrate many of the principles of genre theory.

Native speakers of (Australian) English can very quickly identify three key aspects of this text. They are field, mode and tenor. First aspect is field. We can rapidly identify the topic, what the text is about. We work out the field of this text largely from the lexical items (a word which occurs in a very limited number of contexts). Second aspect is mode. Mode is talking about the role language is playing. Aspects of language used that indicate this mode to us include the fact that we have only one speaker’s contributions. Third aspect is tenor. Tenor is the interpersonal relationships between the interactants.

What we have done so far is to describe the register of the text. Register is describes the immediate situational context in which the text was produced.

We can suggest what the overall purpose or function of the interaction is – that is, we can suggest what genre the text belongs to.

Martin offers two useful definitions of genre. First:

A genre is staged, goal oriented, purposeful activity in which speakers engage as members of our culture (1984:25).

 

Less technically:

Genres are how things get done, when language is used to accomplish them (1985b:248).

Defining genres in this way, we can see that there are as many different genres as there are recognizable social activity types in our culture. There are:

Literary genres                        : short stories, romantic novels, whodunnits, autobiographies, ballads, 

                                                sonnets, fables, tragedies, sitcoms.

Popular written genres            : instructional manuals, newspaper articles, magazine reports, recipes,

Educational genres                  : lectures, tutorials, report/ essay writing, leading seminars, examinations,    

                                                text-book writing

A stage is our cultural context which permits us to make sense of the text: to find a social activity type in which the kinds of meanings realized here would have a purpose.

Thus, studying how people use language forces us to recognize, first, that linguistic behavior is goal oriented (we can only make sense of talk if we assume it to be purposeful); and, second, that linguistic behavior takes place within both a situation and a culture, in relation ti which it can be evaluated as appropriate or inappropriate.

There are two different levels of context. They are context of situation is a context that described by describing the register of the text. Context of culture, a context that gave purpose and meaning to the fact that described by genre.

Schematic structure represents the positive contribution genre makes to a text: a way of getting from A to B in the way a given culture accomplishes whatever the genre in question in functioning to do in that culture ( Martin, 1985b: 251).

Describing the schematic structure of genres brings us two fundamental concepts in linguistic analysis; they are constituency that refers to a part/ whole relationship between elements of some whole, and functional labeling. 

Reference:

Eggins, Suzzanne, 1994, An Introduction to systemic Functional Lingustics.Printer Publisher Ltd. United Kingdom. P: 25-48