‘Genre’ as a general semiotic category?

Tommi Nieminen

Department of Languages, University of Jyväskylä

1. Toward a theory of genres of everyday discourse
2. Genre in literary studies and in linguistics
3. Epistemology of genre
4. Evidential dilemma
5. Ontological dilemma
6. Time and change
7. Discourse theory of genre
8. Bakhtin’s ‘discourse genre’
9. Vygotskyan perspective on context
10. Generalizing to semiotics

Toward a theory of genres of everyday discourse

• even everyday discourse seems to consist of recurrent forms
• different viewpoints for differing fields of study:
  • for the literary scholar, the main interest lies in the connection between collective genres and the individual works
  • for the linguist, genres are a form of functional variation
  • for the semiotician, there is the ultimate question of “Why”—what is the nature of genres and why do they exist?

Genre in literary studies and in linguistics

• a huge difference in the ages of the respective traditions:
  • in literary studies, there is uninterrupted continuum of genre theories ever since Aristotle
  • in linguistics, genre theory is a recent phenomenon—mainly since the 1980’s
• the opening of discussion by Bakhtin in the 1950’s was ignored
• the literary scholars were the first to get in touch with Bakhtin’s ideas on genre—the linguists took a slower start

Epistemology of genre

• how can we identify a genre?
• there’s a long tradition in literary studies that genre resides in the text, has a textual nature
• this tradition has been borrowed to linguistics as well
• however, ever since Benedetto Croce, literary scholars have been aware of the mismatch between textual evidence and genre membership
• textual evidence is simply not enough

Evidential dilemma

• texts don’t tell—and they lie about—their genre
• should genre be discussed only as an analytical category, post hoc researcher’s tool?
• this solution would ignore the question of the social reality of genres
• so how about adding evidence by taking the context of the text into account?
• unfortunately, it’s not any easier—in fact, it’s much harder— to characterize the context with clean, sharp features
• it just seems genres don’s fit any “Platonic” categorization

Ontological dilemma

• to the classics, it was the genre that had “real” existence: individual works only echoed their genres
• after Romanticism, the situation was reversed: genre became more and more a cumulative account of the themes and means of individual works
• nowadays it’s assumed that the relationship between the work and the genre is reciprocal
  • individual texts give the form to the genre
  • …and the genre “fills out the gaps” in the texts, thus giving it an interpretation (or interpretational clues)

Time and change

• structuralist accounts of semiotic codes try to arrest time
• but change should not have to be added to the theory as an afterthought
• Bakhtin: every linguistic act is individual—empirically unique
• there’s no similarity between individual acts unless intentionally created
• similarity demands decontextualization: a unique act has to be partly broken down to recurrent features

Discourse theory of genres

• the situation as it stands:
  • purely formal (“syntactic”) theories have been abandoned
  • purely semantic theories should be abandoned too
  • there is a mutual interplay between the formal and the functional aspects of genre
  • either textual or contextual features may “take the lead” depending on the particular genre
  • Platonic categorization must be rejected in favour of Wittgensteinian ‘family resemblances’
  • the necessity of change must be a built-in feature in the theory

Bakhtin’s ‘discourse genre’

• draws no theoretical demarcation line between literary and other uses of language
  • literary genres are ‘secondary speech genres’
  • secondary genres are made of (or emerge from) ‘primary speech genres’
• genre features are both “syntactic” (i.e., formal) and semantic (thematic etc.)
• however, genre is “a typical form of utterance”?—as with Hjelmslev, meaning has form
• as in everything, Bakhtin stresses the importance of concrete utterances for both the theory and the methodology of linguistics

Vygotskyan perspective on context

• Bakhtin lacks a method of dealing with situational context: this is provided by Vygotsky
• language develops in action: in situations where language is involved but the outcome of the action is not purely linguistic
• higher mental action, concepts, needs decontextualized language
• genres provide the means for this: situation type and linguistic type are semiotically linked with each other

Generalizing to semiotics

• trouble with the forefathers:
  • Saussure’s “semiology” fails to account for the inevitability of change and dynamics
  • Peirce’s “semeiotic” stresses the individuality of signs too far—the theory lacks the concept of semiotic system
• codes do not exist prior to utterance, they emerge in the act of speaking
• systems are the outcome of decontextualization
• discourse genres provide the intermediate step:
  • in themselves, they decontextualize unique utterances
  • but they still show strong ties to the context or context type
  • …thus getting in between the unique and the typical