dwight.atkinson wrote:
>
> Thanks, Mike, Eva, and Glenn for your encouraging and socializing
> comments. Here is what I've written about register vis-a-vis genre in an
> in-press publication. It's based on my dissertation, which is now about
> six years old, so many of the references are rather dated (for example, I
> used an article of Martin's from 1985). I should also say that it is a
> discussion written largely for linguists and rhetoricians, so it really
> has their interests at heart, and they may not necessarily be the
> interests of many of those on this list. Also, I do not bring in
> Hasan's views, which I do not know enough about. But enough qualifying.
>
> I must note before beginning however that the article by Kamberelis cited
> here (G. Kamberelis, 1994, "Genre as institutionally informed social
> practice") is a really excellent (and LONG) discussion and review of genre
> theory with lots of connections with and discussions of Bakhtin, Vygotsky,
> Giddens, and others (including the work of Carol B. and Chuck B., I
> believe, on this list).I think it's something that activity theorists
> would get a lot out of if they don't already know it.
>
> REGISTER
> Halliday (1988, p.162) defines a register as "a cluster of associated
> [linguistic] features having a greater-than-random...tendency to
> co-occur." He then cites "scientific English" as an exemplar of the
> concept because "any speaker of English for whom it falls within the
> domain of experience knows it when he sees it or hears it" (1988, p. 62).
> Other linguists, such as Biber (e.g., 1993, 1994; cf., Ferguson, 1983),
> view registers as varieties of language which occur in speech situations
> of varying contextual specificity. In the present study, I adopt a concept
> of register which closely approximates Halliday's, while attempting to
> relate it to the notions of genre and convention developed above.
> The relationship between the concepts of register and genre is in
> fact a complex and often confused one in the study of discourse. It may
> even be the case that the primary difference is merely one of
> disciplinary preference, and that the two words denote basically the
> same phenomenon. Thus, Swales (1990) points out that the discomfort
> re-cently caused in linguistics by the introduction of the concept of
> genre may be due to the fact that register is a longer-established notion
> in that field.
> At least two perspectives on the relationship of genre and register
> can be found in discourse linguistics. Couture (1986, p.82) details one
> position:
>
> genres can only be realized in completed texts or texts that can be
> projected as complete, for a genre does more than specify kinds of codes
> [i.e., registers] extant in a group of related texts; it specifies
> conditions for beginning, continuing, and ending a text.
>
> In contrast to genres, then, registers for Couture--as for Halliday
> (1988)--are groupings of linguistic features into certain functional
> communicative "codes" or styles (e.g., journalistic writing, "legalese").
> Genres and registers are, in this view, theoretically indepen-dent, and
> can be combined in various (although not all possible) permutations.
> Martin (1985) describes a fundamentally different genre-register
> relationship than the one proposed by Couture. For Martin, genre is
> manifested in register, and register is manifested in language. That is,
> genre is an abstract sociocultural system which underlies and determines
> the permissible combinations of registral components (these components
> being categorized within the systemic linguistic frame-work of field,
> tenor, and mode), in a way similar to that by which register constrains
> language.
>
> While Couture and Martin differ in regard to the relationships they
> posit between register and genre, they agree in clearly distinguishing the
> two concepts from one another, and in placing the latter on a more
> abstract plane. For the purposes of the present study, I will make a less
> absolute distinction between register and genre, while retaining the basic
> difference in level of abstraction; to a certain degree, my version of the
> relationship synthesizes the views of Couture and Martin. Thus, whereas
> genre represents the complex, conventionalized *rhetorical* form and
> content of whole texts, register primarily represents the patterns of
> co-occurring *linguistic* structures that comprise such texts. By
> "rhetorical," however, I do not intend to exclude such linguistic
> structures--properly speaking, the generic level of text will *include*
> the registral level, as register is centrally involved in solving the
> rhetorical problem(s) for which a genre is constituted. But register will
> *not* typically include many of the generic components of text, since the
> latter make sense only holistically. It is thus possible to describe a
> disembodied "strip" of language as, for example, legal register, while
> generic components would make little or no sense if similarly
> decontextual-ized. In this view, then, register is a (theoretically)
> detachable part of a larger organic concept--genre. In actual language
> use, however, register will rarely if ever occur in such a detached mode.
> Bakhtin (1986, p.64) places genre and register (which he calls
> "functional style") in substantially the same relationship as I have:
>
> [Functional] [s]tyle is inseparably linked to particular thematic
> unities, and--what is especially important--to particular compositional
> unities: to particular types of construction of the whole, types of its
> completion, and types of relations between the speakers and other
> participants in speech communication.... Style enters as one element into
> the generic unity of the utterance. Of course, this does not mean that
> language style cannot be the subject of its own independent study. Such a
> study, that is, of language stylistics as an indepenent discipline, is
> both feasible and necessary. But this study will be correct and productive
> only if based on a constant awareness of the generic nature of language
> styles...
>
> The idea that register is a component of genre motivates the
> analytical methodology employed in the present study. As described in
> chapter 3 of the present work, language-oriented discourse analysis is
> undertaken at two levels: the rhetorical (or generic), and the registral.
> But whereas genre subsumes register--and registral elements (inasmuch as
> they have rhetorical significance) are therefore considered at the former
> level of analysis--at the latter level register is treated as primarily a
> self-contained phenomenon. (From chap. 1 of "Scientific Discourse in
> Sociohistorical Context: The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
> Society of London, 1675-1975. In Press from Erlbaum.
>
> Best,
> Dwight