| The term "Genre" comes from the French (originally Latin genus) word for 'kind' or 'class'. Ever since Aristotle's "Poetics", the term has been mainly used in rhetoric and literary theory.Recent work in linguistics has extended the study of genre beyond the literary domain. The concept of "Genre" has been studied in a variety of disciplines, ranging from folklore studies, ethnography of communication, ethnomethodology, psychology, rhetoric to applied linguistics. The concept of genre itself is certainly not a new one. What is new, however, is the interest in the analysis of non-literary genres and the attempt to characterize genre in terms of a set of linguistic properties generally applicable across a large number of genres such as: news report, academic paper, advertising, shopping, chatting and interview, etc, ."Genre" is an extremely complicated concept, presented in particular groups of texts. With the development of text linguistics and discourse analysis, linguists are no longer satisfied with surface-level linguistic description, but turn to seek deeper social-cultural rationales for text construction and interpretation, thus arising genre analysis as a powerful tool for an "insightful and thick description"(Bhatia 1993:11) of texts. A model for discourse both cultural and institutional explanation and interpretation is needed in order to posit a correlation between language use and extra-linguistic situations.Discussions in these disciplines have contributed to the development of a theory for genre. Of the many attempts, systemic functional linguistics, which provides a plausible link between grammar and text, and between text and socio-cultural context, has proved to be fruitful when applied to genre analysis. It offers an integrated, comprehensive and systematic model of language, which enables genres to be described at different levels. The present study will be largely set in a systemic functional framework, but get some inspirations from the other approaches. The object of analysis in this study is English advertising discourse. Advertising is the non-personal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services, or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media. The paper will be carried out on how advertising can be characterized in terms of generic features.The study will be divided into three steps: Step one: to review previous literature on genre analysis as well as relevant models for analyzing genre Step two: to set the general linguistic principles and outline the tri-strata-model for genre analysis Step three: to apply the framework to the analysis of data,which includes: a) describing the generic structure of the selected genre; b) providing detailed linguistic descriptions of the data material; and c) working towards a more general account of the connection between genre and textual featuresThis paper will include five chapters: Chapter one gives a general survey of this field, briefly introducing the significance of the study; Chapter two reports the study carried out at the first step, this part discusses the notions of 'genre', and reviews the studies of 'genre' by different scholars from different schools; Chapter three outlines the explanatory model for genre analysis at the second step. This part sets up a tri-strata-model, which is construed by three independent semiotic systems of genre, register and language; Chapter four focuses on research work we have done at the third step. At the third step, first attempt will be made to uncover the generic structural elements of advertising discourse. Detailed linguistic descriptions will then be made of the collected data, and the distinctive features for each stratum of the model will be isolated. Linguistic descriptions will take place on the strata of lexicogrammar and discourse. For practical reasons, the stratum of phonology will be left out.Chapter three introduces two concepts: contextual configurati...
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