Identifying the concept of genre has been a debatable issue in research communities. In Australia, Martin (1992) uses the concept to complement the Hallidayan notion of register. In America, Miller (1984), Bazerman (1994), Swales (1990), and Yates and Orlikowski (1992) introduce models for conducting generic analysis. In Hong kong, Bhatia (1993) puts the concept into practice by suggesting an analytical framework to account for English for Specific Purposes (ESP) texts. Despite these apparently different frameworks, this section introduces the key points of a functional genre theory focusing on Swales's (1990) definition of genre, Bhatia's(1993) ideas of the goal of genre theory and Miller's (1984) views on genre as a social action. Such theories …show more content…
It does not only highlight the purposive nature of a given genre but also elucidate the way a generic construct takes form. Taking communicative purpose as a basis, Swales (1990), in his monograph Genre analysis, defines 'genre' as:
As a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constraints choice of content and style. Communicative purpose is both a privileged criterion and one that operates to keep the scope of genre…narrowly focused on comparable rhetorical action. (p. 58)
For Swales, a genre is a class of communicative events which includes language, participants and the cultural as well as historical environment in which the production and reception of these communicative events occur. The privileged criterial feature that turns a collection of communicative events into genre is some shared set of communicative purposes. The present thesis analyzes the communicative purpose(s) of blog sample and determines whether they form a set of communicative events with marked
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Established members of discourse community recognize and understand the rational very well. What the community of bloggers tries to accomplish in an American political context triggers a particular text structure and a set of conventional rhetorical strategies.
Along with Swales, Bhatia (1993) defines genres in terms of consistencies in communicative events and communicative purposes. Genre analysis revolves around:
Investigating instances of conventionalized or institutionalized text artifacts in the context of specific institutional and disciplinary practices, procedures and cultures in order to understand how members of specific discourse communities construct, interpret and use these genres to achieve their communicative goals and why they write the way they do. (Bhatia, 2002, p.