The XII International Bakhtin Conference, Jyväskylä 18–22 July 2005
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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