A Preliminary Investigation Into The Multi-Genre Phenomenon In Text Structure

Along with the rise of textualinguistics and discourse analysis, the major concern of linguistics is experiencing a gradual shift from lexico-grammatical layer to such higher-level units as text, discourse, etc. An essential effect of that prevailing trend is that the concept of genre representing text types has drawn great attention from a considerable number of linguists, functional or formal, and is gradually emerging as a new highlight in linguistic study. In her collaborative work with Halliday Language, context, and text: aspects of language in a social semiotic perspective (1989), Hasan has made outstandingly constructive contributions to genre study. Her presentation of the concept of generic structural potential offers a satisfactorily appropriate solution to the formulation of service encounter and generation of actual texts of the genre. One major deficiency in her research is that her scope of study is mainly confined to texts generated by a single genre, and that no justice whatever has been done to the phenomenon of two or more genres co-existing in a single text. Likewise no foot has been set on this vast wilderness of research from other linguists whose devotion is chiefly directed at the genre study, such as Martin, Ventola, Eggins, Swales, etc. The deliberate negligence of the sphere of texts generated by more than one genre in linguistics by no means indicates that there is an extremely low percentage of multi-generic texts in the ocean of the existing literature in the world. On the contrary, multi-generic phenomenon is rather universal and commonplace, and texts generated by two or more genres probably exceed that of mono-generic ones to a rather considerable extent. Whenever we engage ourselves in reading, we would frequently find out that a few paragraphs of description or narration would scatter themselves in an argumentative essay, or that some episode of description of figures or scenes would be involved in a narrative. These are actual examples of multi-generic texts.