Download Swales` definition of discourse community

Swales’ definition of discourse community
 has a broadly agreed set of common public goals
 has mechanisms of intercommunication among its members
 uses its participatory mechanisms primarily to provide information
and feedback
 utilizes and hence possesses one or more genres in the
communicative furtherance of its aims
 has its own specific lexis (terminology, jargon)
 has a threshold level of membership (not anybody can participate)
Swales’ definitions of genre
-Swales is attempting to describe how various different groups of
scholars have used and defined the concept of genre
Key contributions of particular areas:
Genre in folklore studies (i.e., like Jacobs)
 use the concept of strategically; don’t take it as rigid
 look for the social function that the genre fills
 the distinctions that the studied groups make between genres are
important
Genre in literary studies
 ‘a new genre is always the transformation of one or several old
genres: by inversion, by displacement, by combination’
Genre in linguistics
 genre (patterns of organization that can be seen in a group of texts)
is different from register (the vocabulary of a particular group)
Genre in rhetoric
 the texts and genres studied don’t always have to be current
Expressed even more concisely (see pg. 44):
 a distrust of classification and of facile or premature prescriptivism
(i.e., suggesting that there are rules of language that others should
follow)
 a sense that genres are important for integrating the past and
present
 a recognition that genres are situated within discourse communities,
wherein the beliefs and naming practices of members have
relevance
 an emphasis on communicative purpose and social action
 an interest in generic structure (and its rationale)
 an understanding double generative capacity of genres – to
establish rhetorical goals and to further their accomplishment
Swales’ ‘working definition of genre’:
 a genre is a class of communicative events
 shared purpose turns a collection of communicative events into a
genre
 exemplars or instances of genres vary in their prototypicality
 the rationale behind a genre establishes constraints on allowable
contributions in terms of their content, positioning and form
 A discourse community’s nomenclature for genres is an important
source of insight