Genre, Register, Modality, and

Participation Framework
 Genre
• Metaphorical frame that refers to the
culturally shaped (and ever
transforming) sets of conventions that
establish broad boundaries for the
constitution of various discourse
types.
 Genre
• Enables us to classify discourse, to
identify its general purpose, to
understand discursive messages and
hoe they work, and reciprocally, to
create meaning both within the
familiar, conventional generic
boundaries and beyond.
 Genre
• Genre essentially is a metaphorical
frame that provides structure for
discourse.
• With structure comes consistency and
recognizability
• Provide us with ways of naming how
we use and understand discourse –
prose, conversation, narrative,
oratory, poetry, novel, novella.
 Genre
• It associates discourse with function
and purpose and practice.
• It establishes limits and recognizable
boundaries, allowing us to identify a
particular instance of discourse as
belonging to the instruction or
advertisement, stand-up comedy, or
magic show.
 Cookbook genre
• The genre of the recipe exists for the
triple purpose of sharing cooking
methods with others, verbally and
pictorially illustrating those cooking
methods as a means of verbatim
instruction or suggestion for
approximate replications, and
applying those cooking methods in
an attempt to replicate the dish.
 Cookbook genre
• Cooking directions typically reflect a
basic chronological order –designating
steps that need to be taken first,
second, next, and to forth, sometimes
numbered and sometimes not.
• They provide guidelines for cooking
and desired outcomes.
 Cookbook genre
• These stances, and more, become visible
as we examine discourse from the points
of view of language as conceptually and
interactionally meaningful and genre as
frame for social action.
• That is, the way each recipe is organized
and presented –through words and
graphics –reveals much about the
presenter’s stance
Genre: Content and Purpose of
Discourse
• What shapes the discourse into genres,
then, are essential and purpose
• Content or informational substance is at
the core of any genre. At the level of
informational substance or
“propositional content” genres serves as
rhetorical vehicles to communicate facts,
to present ideas, to question reality, all
within culturally influenced sets of
conventions.
Genre: Content and Purpose of
Discourse
• As frames of discourse, genres
instruct, entertain, inform, invite,
move, impel, or impassion.
• Genres succeed in doing all of this
and more, because they reflect our
individual experiences within our
social and cultural situation through
recurring conventionalized forms and
structures.
 Genre of the Narrative
• Narrative is a common discursive genre
that crosscuts other genre.
• Narrative commonly occurs in ordinary
conversation and throughout
institutional discourse.
• Narrative are stories in purpose, stories
built in discourse to elicit emotion, to
portray a viewpoint, to convey moral
lesson, to judge and seek like-
mindedness, to persuade, to construct
one’s or others’ identities.
 Guiding Questions
• What elements of the speakers identity are
revealed in the narrative? (gender, age,
education, profession)
• What sorts of feelings is the speaker
expressing? How? Does he/she actually
name the feelings?
• How are the details of the place represented?
• How are the details of time represented?
• How do the details of place and time work
together to depict this speakers feelings
during the event?
• By far the most emotional day of
school I've ever experienced was the
last day of year 6. I came to school
thinking it would just be another
normal last day of school. it turned
out to be the complete opposite.
• The thought of not seeing friends and
teachers again was very saddening.
This caused an endless amount of
tears to come out of everybody's eyes,
including the year six teachers! We
were all an emotional wreck. This
went on from about an hour after
recess til the start of lunch and even
during lunch there were still
innumerable people crying.
• After lunch was assembly. All the year 6's
were meant to do a flash mob for the last
part of the assembly, but I didn't know how
we were possibly going to do it in the state
we were all in. All of a sudden the music
started and everybody's face just lit up and
we sprung into action. It was perfect. The
entire assembly loved it.
• The bell rang and that's when all the
crying started again except this time it
was twice as bad. There were probably
only a handful of kids, including myself,
whose faces didn't look like a river was
flowing through it. Even though I wasn't
crying I still felt very sad because two of
my best friends were moving out of
Darwin and my other three best friends
weren't even going to the same middle
school as me.
• All the crying had eventually stopped
at around 3 'o' clock and everybody
went home.
• I always hated primary school,
but now I wish I was back there with
all my friends playing rugby with not a
worry in the world.
Basic patterns of language used that combine
to shape the structure of narrative

1. Narratives are “tellable” or “reportable”.

2. Narratives contain settings and
“orientations” that provide backgrounds
for the stories to develop.
3. Personal narratives are most often
stories of past time experiences
constructed with subjectively ordered
memories to link past to present. These
memories emerge through subjective,
experience vantage points and temporal
descriptions.
Basic patterns of language used that combine
to shape the structure of narrative

• Experiencer vantage points –explicit

and implicit commentary by narrators
that reflects their internal states of
feeling and thinking –both as
experiencers of the event in the past
and experiencers-narrator of the story
in the present as it is being retold.
• Temporal descriptions –situate the
events within a recognizable temporal
space, using time adverbs, clarify
background details, enhance
contrasts between personal
expectations and reality, link remote
past to recent past, link past to
present, relive and recreate
experiences in collaboration with a
present-time interlocutor
Basic patterns of language used that combine
to shape the structure of narrative

4. Narratives are built around and

driven by a complicating action, a most
reportable event or a problematic event.
A complicating action or problematic
event or most reportable event is “the
event that is the least common” of all
elements in the narrative and often
contains linguistic and paralinguistics
cues concerning the reason the
narrative is being told in the first place .
• Complicating action, problematic
event –These actions or events are
foreshadows in the orientation of the
narrative; details of time and place are
gradually and systematically
elaborated upon to allow for the
sudden, unexpected, or otherwise
problematic issue to be highlighted in
the retelling.
Basic patterns of language used that combine
to shape the structure of narrative

5. Narratives often express a resolution of

the problem or a calming down of the
intensity related in the story.
6. Narratives always express a viewpoint.
In so doing, explicit labeling of feelings,
emotions, impressions, judgments of self
or other, and other aspects of such
viewpoints may or may not be presented.
Often, narratives establish contrasts as
discursive means of systematically
building such as viewpoints.
 Modality
• Also called the “channel” in some of
the communication-based literature,
refers to the medium in which
discourse is produced.
• Involves three very basic modes of
communicating: oral or spoken,
written, and e-discourse.
 Modality
• Oral discourse –is most often associate with
face-to-face and telephonic interactions.
• Written discourse –typically associated with
paper, pencil, word processor, and print
media
• Electronic discourse –associated with screen-
based media, like texting, email, and other
online practices, such as social media,
specialized information, general information,
retail sales and gaming.
 Register
• A concept that addresses the
linguistic and contextual components
that constitute genres.
• Refers to the range of multiple
possibilities concerning lexical and
grammatical choice within genre.
• What specific words used in the
communication?
• How formal and technical and field
specific might they be?
• How do various grammatical
construction fit the genre?
• Are the construction used?
• Is first person singular subject pronoun
“I” used often? Is “I” used at all?
• How about the second person singular
pronoun “you?” if “you” is intended to
express a plural meaning, how is it
accomplished?
 Register
• Register-based language choice serves to
both maintain generic boundaries and
also expand them, often blurring some of
metaphorical lines between specific
genres and others.
• Context enters into the study of register
by giving additional detail about the
communication.
• Context is key to both genre and
register.
 Examples of Registers
• Colloquialism –found in ordinary
conversation between peers, oral
narrative, e-discourse, some genres of
written discourse:
– Grammatical reductions of forms
– Informal words, lexical reductions, and
phrases in place of unmarked or formal
counterparts.
– Colloquial fillers and hesitation markers.
– Profanity, near profanity, exclamations.
– Slang, in-group expressions.
– Verbs expressing extreme degrees of
subjective, personal emotion
 Examples of Registers
• Formalism –in ordinary conversation
where some degree of deference is
expected; in e-discourse where some
degree of deference is expected; in
written discourse, especially business
correspondences, academic research,
laws and legal context, policy
documents, and contracts.
– Formal words or expressions in place of
unmarked or colloquial expression.
 Examples of Registers
• Technical lexicons –note that some
lexical items are also used in everyday
conversational registers or cross-cut
more than one technical register. The
meanings of words are linked to
genres and context in which they are
used, and may change dramatically
from genre to genre and from context
to context.
 Participation Framework
• We cannot truly understand the
complexity of discourse unless we are
aware of the various participants
involved in it.
• We assumed the existence of certain
categorical understanding of “speaker”
and “hearer,” “addressee” or
“interlocutor” but sometimes these
categories are more complicated.
 Participation Framework
• Likewise, the category of “audience”
becomes more conceptually and
interactionally dynamic than a body of
viewers or listeners, shifting their
status between intended overhears of
talk and actual addressees.
• Will provide us with novel ways of
“seeing” discursive events and making
new sense of them.
 Participation Framework
• From a very simple perspective, we
can construe such interactional
exchanges on the basis of speaker and
hearer, with each role being fulfilled
by the person doing the speaking on
the one hand, on the other.
• Speakers become hearers and hearers
become speakers, and so continues
the exchange.
 Participation Framework
• Participation framework helps us to
more accurately analyze discourse by
virtue of who is involved in beyond the
rigid and linear model of a single
speaker and a single addressee.
• Concepts such as overhearers and
overhearing audiences are key to
understanding discourse in general,
and media discourse in particular.