genre studies

This is the second article in a cycle on the connection between genre studies and linguistics. The previous article discussed the question “What have genre studies given to linguistics?” This article focuses on linguistic methods used in speech genres theory: more traditional for linguistics, starting with the descriptive method and its later varieties – structural – and less traditional (component analysis, the method of immediate constituents, the generative method, the method of describing external and deep content structures, the method of semantic fields).

The article presents a description of the genre system of the executive written discourse. The paper considers viewpoints of specialists in genre studies on the criteria for classifying genres. It presents speech genres typologies on the inter- and extra-linguistic bases according to: communicative intention, type of activity, specificity of the audience, etc. Through the analyses of various conceptions, the author comes to the conclusion that a complete modeling of a genre system is possible only if a number of factors is considered.

The article summarizes the preliminary results of the interaction of genre studies and linguistics of the last three decades. The significance of genre studies for linguistics is determined by the fact that the speech genres themselves are of exceptional importance for the language – the object of linguistics: not equal to the language completely, speech genres are a phenomenon without which it is impossible to truly comprehend the structure, functioning, and history of the language.