By integrating form and content within situation and context, recent work in genre theory makes genre an essential player in the making of meaning. Genre must allow us to see behind particular classifications (which change as our purposes change) and form (which trace but do not constitute genre). Genre entails purposes, participants, and themes, so understanding genre entails understanding a rhetorical and semantic situation and a social context.
Recent conceptions of genre as a dynamic and semiotic construct illustrate how to unify form and content, place text within context, balance process and product, and acknowledge the role of both the individual and the social.
Genre respond appropriately to situations that writers encounter repeatedly.
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Also, how to conform the generic conventions and how to respond appropriately to a given situation. As Hallyday defines it, situation consists of a field (roughly, what is happening) a tenor (who is involved), and a mode (what role language is playing). Those components of situation determine what Hallyday calls “register” (the linguistic equivalent to what have called genre).
Furthermore, register/genre is a semantic as well as functional concept. It is the configuration of semantic resources that the member of a culture typically associates with a situation type. It is the meaning potential that is accessible in a given social context. Hallyday associates genre with situation type and the making of meaning.
On the other hand, it is difficult to specify what context includes (not everything about the surrounding environment is relevant for the language use being considered, and some things outside the surrounding environment are relevant). Genre not only respond to, but also construct recurring situations. The context of situation and context of culture were devised in part to deal with the problem of framing. Since that, a text’s reflection of genre indirectly reflects