The article deals with the intergenre factor in genre studies. It is proved that a description of almost any genre that claims to be adequate from almost any point of view must necessarily consider how the genre relates to other genres: in a narrow meaning, within various typologies, in a broad meaning – within a national genre sphere or a set of different national genre spheres. The author discusses the following aspects and types of intergenre: historical (which includes, first of all, the concept of primary and secondary speech genres of Mikhail Bakhtin), cultural – when identifying such connections between genres, it is extremely important whether these genres belong to the same culture or different ones. A special case of different cultures is sometimes different historical periods of one culture, for example, modern Russian culture and Soviet culture, which differ in value priorities, social relations and roles, as well as precedent texts and other linguistic features. It is shown that in modern genre studies the use of intergenre methodology is mostly in demand and is effective in the case of new genres which are formed on the basis of old, traditional ones. First of all, this concerns numerous Internet genres. The tradition of their description is based on non-Internet predecessors and it arose almost simultaneously with Internet genre studies. A less obvious, although having the same nature, case is genres which were formed on the basis of some predecessor genres in the more distant past (many genres of secondary mediated spheres of communication are explained through oral genres). It is shown that the national-cultural basis of intergenre connections is also the inclusion of genres in one national genre sphere, and the ultimate case of inter-genre connections is the symbiosis of two genres.