Prologue

Work in linguistics over the past decades has extended the study of genre beyond the literary domain. The concept of genre itself is certainly not a new one. What is new, however, is the interest in the analysis of non-literary genres and the attempt to characterize genre in terms of a set of linguistic properties generally applicable across a large number of genres. The underlying assumption is that there may be underlying recurrent features which are prototypically present in certain groups of texts. With the development of text linguistics and discourse analysis, linguists are no longer satisfied with surface-level linguistic description, but turn to seek deeper social-cultural rationales for text construction and interpretation, thus arising genre analysis as a powerful tool for an “insightful and thick description” (Bhatia, 1993: 11) of texts. A model for discourse or genre analysis is then called for which is rich in sociological, cultural and institutional explanation in order to posit a correlation between language use and extra-linguistic situations.