How to define and describe genres and styles

Abstract

This article is a critical examination, at a very general theoretical level, of the basic principles underlying the concept of 'genre' and secondarily the concept of 'style' as compared with 'genre'. The article is based on the author's book (Saukkonen 2001), written in Finnish. What is genre? What is the structure of genre? How should genres be pictured so that they correspond to the competence of language users? These are difficult questions, which have been approached from different directions. They will be discussed here utilising and modifying primarily certain concepts of systemic-functional linguistics and conceptual and cognitive semantics. The notion of genre has been understood and defined principally in two ways: contextually and contextual-semantically. My starting point is the latter conception, on the basis of cognitive science and cognitive or conceptual semantics, according to which the immediate context is cognitive-conceptual and meaning is conceptual. Generic variation and stylistic variation are different stages of the same phenomenon: they have common linguistic means and contextual origins. Therefore they will be handled together. Because 'style' has proved problematic and is thus often avoided, the article seeks to rehabilitate it, regarding it as a relative concept referring to variation in form around any invariant content. Such a broad interpretation would be congenial to literary studies as well.

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