Towards an Understanding of the Notion of Genre

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Chomskyan theory was most developed and influential, generally known as the transformational generative (TG) grammar. The TG approach carries on the legacy of analyzing language via form and regards linguistic behavior as governed by a set of rules stored in the human mind. Its aim is to discover the rules which govern how the constituents can be put together to form grammatically correct sentences, and to formulate these rules as general as possible. Therefore, each sentence is analyzed in complete isolation, both from its linguistic and extra-linguistic context in which it might be used. Reality today, however, is very much different. Linguistics has now emerged from a period in which the TG grammar is considered to provide the most promising theoretical framework for linguistics. Rather, the Chomskyan theory has often been criticized for its neglect of the contextual study of language and for not recognizing that language is used as a way of realizing social activity. More and more scholars are working to improve and expand theories which integrate the study of language with its linguistic and social cultural context. This functional orientation to the study of language has become central to the analysis of genre, particularly to a genre-based pedagogy. For, if genre is in the first place a social and cultural phenomenon, then genre-based teaching must be based on theoretical models which are culturally oriented. We shall elaborate on this in the next chapter. In the following section, we shall outline three intellectual traditions which have influenced the contemporary thinking about genre. They derive actually from very different origins, i.e. anthropology, the philosophy of language, and the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on genre.