Geoff Thompson On Genre

Thompson (2014: 42-3):

If we now turn, more briefly, to genre, this can be seen in very simple terms as register plus communicative purpose: that is, it includes the more general idea of what the interactants are doing through language, and how they organise the language event, typically in recognisable stages, in order to achieve that purpose. An image that may help you to grasp the difference between register and genre is to see register as cloth and genre as garment: the garment is made of an appropriate type of cloth or cloths, cut and shaped in conventional ways to suit particular purposes. Similarly, a genre deploys the resources of a register (or more than one register) in particular patterns to achieve certain communicative goals.

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, in SFL Theory, 'communicative purpose/goal' is rhetorical mode, a textual system of context. Every register realises the mode as well as the field and tenor of a situation type. The notion of 'genre' here is thus redundant.

Thompson's aim here was to include Hasan's notion of genre in his coverage of SFL, but Hasan herself identified her 'genre' as Halliday's 'register'.

The Verb 'Exist'

 Thompson (2014: 110-1):

It is useful to compare an existential process with a possible rewording using the verb ‘exist’:

Maybe some other darker pattern exists.

Although this is very close in meaning, the verb ‘exist’ itself is best analysed as a material process: the rewording reflects at least partly a choice to represent the entity (‘pattern’) as involved in a ‘going-on’ (which happens to be that of existing). The analyses of the two clauses are given in Figure 5.20 for comparison (‘Maybe’ is, of course, left unlabelled since it has no experiential meaning).

Blogger Comments:

To be clear, such clauses are existential, not material, on several criteria.

1. They satisfy the category meaning of existentials 'being (existence)', but not of materials 'doing (doing, happening, doing to/with)'.
2. There is no pro-verb, as there is for materials ('do, do to/with').
3. The unmarked present tense is the simple present ('exists') of existentials, not the present in present ('is existing') of materials.

See Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 354) for criteria distinguishing process types.