Rather than starting with apriori categories, inductive text typologies classify text types based on perceived textual patterns. Douglas Biber’s work in corpus linguistics has most influenced such an approach to genre classification. Corpus linguistics, using large scale electronic text databases or corpora, allow researchers to conduct systematic searches for linguistic features, patterns, and variations in spoken and written texts. In Variation Across Speech and Writing, for instance, Biber begins by identifying groups of linguistic features (what Biber calls “dimensions” such as “narrative versus non-narrative,” “non-impersonal versus impersonal style,” “situation dependent versus elaborated reference”) that co-occur with high frequency in texts. Then, applying these dimensions to a statistical analysis of a corpora of twenty-three genres, Biber examined the degree to which these dimensions appear within various texts in each genre. Based on such studies, Biber has been able to identify a great deal of linguistic variation within genres, suggesting that genres can be defined in terms of more or less complexity.7 (For more on Biber’s analysis of textual clusters on the basis of shared multi-dimensional, linguistic characteristics as well as his historical work mapping the rise and fall of genres, see Dimensions of Register Variation: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison; Discourse on the Move: Using Corpus Analysis to Describe Discourse Structure; and Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Register.)
This notion of “more or less” has played an important role in historical and corpus linguistic approaches to genre categorization. Based on Eleanor Rosch’s theory of prototypes, which takes a psychological (as opposed to a classical) view of human categorization, such a typology identifies membership within genre on the basis not of “either-or” but on the basis of “more-or-less, better and poorer” (Diller 21). As Brian Paltridge explains, prototype theory describes how people categorize objects according to a prototypical image they have conditioned in their minds by socio-cultural factors, while classical theories describe categorization based on shared, essential properties within objects that result in objective assessment of category membership (Genre, Frames and Writing 53). The famous example in this case is the way some birds, such as sparrows, are “birdier” birds than others, such as ostriches. The notion of prototypes, related to Wittgenstein’s idea of family resemblances, allows genre researches to define text membership within genres on the basis of how closely their structural and linguistic patterns relate to the genre prototype. Some texts, thus, are closer to their genre prototype while others function more on the periphery of prototypicality, or, more accurately, on the boundaries of different prototypicalities, as in the case of mixed genres. The important point here is that the relation between texts and genres is not simply based on features internal to both, but more powerfully is based on learned, conceptual relations between “memory, context and frames,” thus rendering “the notion of prototype as a principle of selection, organization and interpretation of genre frames” (Paltridge, Genre, Frames and Writing 62).
Prototype theory has important implications for genre study and teaching. Within SFL genre theory, J.R. Martin has used it to distinguish between typological and topological genre classifications: “For purposes of typological classification, we have to define just what percentage of causal relations is required for a text to qualify [as a member of the genre]. The topological perspective on the other hand allows us to position texts on a cline, as more or less prototypical . . .” (“Analysing” 15). The topological approach thus allows SFL approaches to genre teaching to use the teaching-learning cycle to move students towards more and more prototypical genres through sequenced assignments. At the same time, corpus linguistic-based analyses of genres have allowed researchers and teachers working in English for Specific Purposes (as we will describe in the next chapter) to identify the most and least salient features of different academic and workplace genres so that these can be taught more realistically.
We will conclude this section with a brief discussion of how historical and corpus linguistic approaches to genre have informed the way we understand language change by positing genres as the locus of such change (Diller 31). For example, in his study of the adverbial first participle construction in English, Thomas Kohnen describes how that construction first appeared in and then spread through English via its use in different genres. The adverbial first participle first appeared in the English religious treatise and then soon afterward spread to the sermon (Kohnen 116). What is telling is that the adverbial first participle achieved a certain status by virtue of first appearing in prestigious and powerful religious genres, which then acted as catalysts for linguistic change (Kohnen 111). As Diller explains, “the presence of a form in a prestigious genre may prompt its reception in other genres and thus speed up its diffusion throughout the (written) language” (33). Amy Devitt has likewise demonstrated how genre is a significant variable in language change (Writing Genres 124). In her study of how Anglo-English became diffused through Scots-English, Devitt found that Anglicization did not occur evenly throughout Scottish English, but rather occurred “at quite different rates in different genres” (126). Anglicization occurred most rapidly, for example, within religious treatises, and the least rapidly within public records. This suggests that genres can be understood as sites of contestation within histories of language change. While religious treatises anglicized more quickly because of the power of the Church of England, public records, Devitt explains, were more resistant because they “represent the remnants of the political power that Scotland until recently had retained within its own political bodies. The Privy Council may not have much legislative power anymore, but its records can still reflect that older Scots identity through using its older Scots language” (131). Such studies reveal the extent to which genres mediate relations of power historically and linguistically, in ways that enrich the study and teaching of genre. In the next chapter, we will examine the ways that English for Specific Purposes has added to the study and teaching of genre by emphasizing the interaction between discourse community, communicative purpose, and genre.
4 Genre in Linguistic Traditions: English for Specific Purposes
This chapter provides an overview of genre study within English for Specific Purposes (ESP), a field that bridges linguistic and rhetorical traditions. We will begin by defining ESP and identifying key similarities and differences between ESP and Systemic Functional Linguistic (SFL) approaches to genre, and then we will describe how ESP approaches have drawn on linguistic traditions in the process of developing their methods of applied genre study and teaching. We will examine these approaches, track major developments and critiques over the last twenty years, and then conclude by anticipating how ESP genre approaches relate to but also differ from more rhetorical and sociological approaches to genre, the subject of Chapters 5 and 6.
Positioned within the overarching category of Language for Specific Purposes (LSP), English for Specific Purposes focuses on studying and teaching specialized varieties of English, most often to non-native speakers of English, in advanced academic and professional settings. ESP is often used as an umbrella term to include more specialized areas of study such as English for Academic Purposes (EAP), English for Occupational Purposes (EOP), and English for Medical Purposes (EMP). Although ESP has existed since the 1960s and although ESP researchers began to use genre analysis as a research and pedagogical tool in the 1980s, it was John Swales’ groundbreaking book Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings that most fully theorized and developed the methodology for bringing genre analysis into ESP research and teaching. It is largely due to Swales’ work and the research it has inspired over the last twenty years that ESP and genre analysis have become in many ways synonymous (see Belcher, Cheng).
Swales begins Genre Analysis by identifying two key characteristics of ESP genre approaches, namely their focus on academic and research English (which would be expanded to include occupational English), and their use of genre analysis for applied ends. The applied nature of ESP has been a defining feature of the field from its inception. As Swales explains, ESP approaches can be traced to “quantitative studies of the linguistic properties . . . of registers of a language” for the purpose of identifying