On The Framework Of Genre

The thesis aims to refine the existing frameworks of genre from socio-cultural, cognitive and linguistic perspectives to make it more systematic and comprehensive.The study of genre has a long history and can be traced back to the work of Plato and Aristotle in Greek in the studies of poetry and drama. Since the emergence of the category of genre, people defined it in different ways. According to the data the writer collected at present, the more comprehensive definitions of genre are given by two linguists in the area of English for Specific Purpose (ESP): Swales and Bhatia. In their opinions, genre is a class of social activity including language and paralanguage and classified in light of a shared set of communicative purposes which are recognized by members of a language community. They think that the production and comprehension of a text is an interactive process, that is, the prior knowledge about the content, concepts and information structures affect the identification of a genre and its realizations. Bhatia furthers the study of Swales to introduce the personal cognitive factors in genre studies. Swales and Bhatia's studies deepen the understanding of the notion of genre. But as their aim is to explore an effective ESP teaching method they did not make a comprehensive framework of genre. Nevertheless, their understandings of genre lay the sound foundation for the present study. The writer summarizes six features of genre on the basis of the previous studies.Before the 19th century, the studies of genre center on literature. From the latter half of the 20th century, scholars in linguistics and other fields begin to study genre. These fields range from folktale, anthropology, discourse analysis, rhetoric and sociology, etc. They put forward different definitions and theories of genre. But in terms of the framework of genre, the studies mainly lie in the field of linguistics at present, especially in Systemic-functional linguistics (SFL). The representatives include Hasan, Ventola and Martin. The commonness between them is that all of them focus on the study of the relationship between context and the system of language, emphasize the relationship between the social functions and the linguistic structures and study genre from amulti-stratal perspective which include socio-cultural, situation, meaning, lexico-grammar and phonology. The advantage of SFL study is the stratified theory and the systematic. But there are also some deficiencies. The scholars in SFL hold different opinions on the strata of genre. So making clear the relationship among the strata is necessary in this thesis. In addition to that, scholars in SFL only study genre from socio-cultural and linguistic perspectives, and they neglect the cognitive and psychological perspectives. This results in the theoretical partiality. Brian Paltridge makes the framework of genre from socio-cultural, pragmatic, cognitive and psychological perspectives based on the combination of the studies of SFL and Fillmore's framesemantics. This framework has some advantages. Its shortcoming is that it is less systematic and the relationship among context, genre and language is not clear. And the cognitive perspective in this framework neglects personal factors' influence on the realization of a genre. These frameworks of genre deepen the understanding of genre, but all of them fail to provide a more comprehensive and explainable framework.Prof. Zhang Delu points out that in future, we should develop and refine the existing frameworks of genre and make them more perfect and accurate on the basis of the recognized features of genre and the analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the existing frameworks. Guided by this suggestion, the writer clarifies the relationship among context, genre, and language and reclassifies the dimensions of context. And then the writer refines the framework of genre from socio-cultural, cognitive and linguistic perspectives. Compared with the existing frameworks of genre, the refined one highlights the cognitive factors...