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