Section 10.5 Classifying texts: Genre
Compare Text 1 to Text 7.
Text 7Baked Apples. Time—½ hour.1 lb. apples, 2 oz. brown sugar, ground cinnamon, 1 tablespoonful cold water, rind and juice of a lemon.Wash the apples (if an apple corer be handy core them), notch them across the top, place them in a Yorkshire pudding tin, with the sugar, lemon-rind, lemon-juice, water, and cinnamon. Bake till tender; serve hot or cold. For Apple Snow, pass through a sieve and beat in lightly whites of 2 eggs and 3 oz. castor sugar, then pile roughly on a dish, and decorate to taste.―May Henry, Edith B. Cohen, The Economical Jewish Cook. London, 18971
www.gutenberg.org/files/54045/54045-0.txt
The two texts are related topically in that they both mention apple corers and the ways in which they can be used (for example, when making baked apples).
Subsection Differences between texts
But they are very different both in their overall structure and in the vocabulary and the grammatical structures they use. Both have a heading describing their general topic, but in Text 1, the text begins straight away, while in Text 7, there is a list of food items before the actual text starts. Text 1 exclusively uses the declarative mood, while Text 7 exclusively uses the imperative mood (with one exception, the subjunctive mood in if an apple corer be handy). Text 1 does not seem to make any assumptions about where the Hearer is and what they are doing while reading the text; Text 7 seems to assume the Hearer is in a kitchen where utensils such as a pudding tin and a sieve are present.
To some extent, these differences are due to the different functions of these two texts: The first text is an encyclopedia entry meant to inform the Hearer, and this is naturally done using declarative clauses, whose basic function is making statement; the second text is a recipe meant to instruct the Hearer, and this is naturally done using imperative clauses, whose basic function is to request actions.
A tour guide informing a group of tourists about the history of the Brandenburg gate, for example, would also use mostly declarative clauses, and if she then wanted to instruct the group to follow her to the Reichstag building, she would switch to imperative clauses — yet her speech would not constitute an encyclopedia article or a recipe.
However, there is often more to a text than can be predicted based on its communicative function. Let us take a closer look at Text 7. While it is natural to use imperatives for giving instructions, there are many other ways of doing so. For example, we frequently use interrogative clauses of the form Can/could you…, will/would you…, would you mind…, etc. Yet, these never occur in recipes (not even very polite ones). We also often use declarative sentences to give instructions — even cooking instructions.
If Aylin were to tell Zoe how to make baked apples, she would probably say something like You wash the apples and notch them across the top, and then you place them in a Yorkshire pudding tin… If she were to share the recipe in her food blog, she might even use a first-person narration using declarative sentences, as shown in Text 8.
Text 8My favorite winter treat: Baked ApplesThis week, I’m going to share my grandmother’s recipe for delicious baked apples that will sweeten your long winter nights. She always insisted on using Grimes Golden, but most stores don’t carry them so I use whatever sweet apples I can get. I use an apple corer to core the apples, notch them across the top and place them in a baking tin with 2 oz. of sugar, ground cinnamon and the rind and juice of one lemon. Then I bake them until they are tender. I promise, you will love this old-timey dessert, which my grandma always served hot but which is also delicious if you serve it cold!
Thus, the use of imperatives in recipes is motivated by their function, but not determined by it. Instead, it is determined by the practice of recipe writing in the English-speaking world. In other language communities, other practices have evolved. In Germany, for example, we find declarative constructions (often in the passive form or with an impersonal pronoun), as in Text 9 from around the same time as Text 7, or subjectless infinitival clauses as in the more recent Text 10.
Text 9499. BratäpfelWeinsauere Äpfel werden im Ganzen geschält. Dann sticht man das Kernhaus mit einem Äpfelstecher heraus und füllt die Höhlung mit Zucker, auf welchen man obenauf ein Schnittchen Butter legt. Im Bratofen in einer kleinen Pfanne lässt man sie braten.―Rebekka Wolf, Kochbuch für israelitische Frauen. Frankfurt, 1896.2
books.google.com/books?id=NZ9EAQAAMAAJ
Text 10Bratapfel[…]Zubereitung • Das Backrohr auf 200 °C vorheizen.―Kochwiki.org
• Die Äpfel unter Heißwasser abwaschen, mit Papier gut abtrocknen und das Kerngehäuse mit dem Ausstecher entfernen.
• Die Zutaten der Füllung miteinander vermischen.
• Die Äpfel füllen und sobald der Ofen seine Temperatur erreicht hat die Butter in der Form schmelzen lassen.
• Die Äpfel in die die Form setzen und für 20 Minuten auf der mittleren Schiene braten lassen.(2020-10-30)3
www.kochwiki.org/wiki/Bratapfel
Classes of texts defined by such textual practices are often referred to as genres — a term borrowed from the study of literary texts that is extended to refer to any recognizable class of texts with a common function and common formal properties.
In the case of recipes, we can see additional formal properties that are typical of the genre. Looking at Text 7, we see lexical items, such as the noun tablespoonful or the phrasal verb beat in, fixed phrases such as serve hot or cold or decorate to taste, and grammatical structures like the fact that constituents are deleted if their referent is obvious from the context, as in bake the apples till they are tender and pile the apple snow roughly on a dish.
Subsection Genre
While recipes and encyclopedia articles would not be referred to as genres in literary studies, those classes of texts that are referred to as such in literary studies are often also genres according to the text-linguistic use of the term. Consider Text 11, which is an excerpt from a novel.
Text 11“How about some baked apples?” asked Grandmother as the oven door was shut on the potatoes; and Mary Jane noticed that she said it just as though Mary Jane could do anything or cook anything a body might want.“They’re good, I think,” replied Mary Jane.“So do I,” said Grandmother, “and we’ll have some. Your Grandfather opened the last box just this morning. You pick out three, Mary Jane, and bring me the apple corer from the drawer and the flat brown bowl from the pantry.”By that time, Mary Jane felt as important as any cook in the land. She washed the apples. Grandmother hadn’t said to do that, but Mary Jane was sure it should be done. Then she took the bowl and the corer over to where Grandmother was working with her strawberries.―Clara Ingram Judson, Mary Jane – Her visit. New York, 1918.
This genre is not defined by a particular mood — the sample contains declarative, interrogative and imperative clauses —, but it does have typical linguistic properties that distinguish it from both encyclopedia articles and recipes. For example, novels typically use the simple past as the tense for the narrative passages and they typically contain passages of quoted speech. Both of these properties are also found, for example, in the genre “news reportage”, but in novels (and short stories), the subject of the Speech act verb introducing the quoted speech typically occurs after the verb (…replied Mary Jane, …said Grandmother), while in news reportage it typically occurs in the standard position before the verb.
Not all linguists use the word genre in the sense introduced here (though the majority use it in this or very similar ways), and not all linguists agree that genre in the sense introduced here is the most relevant way of grouping texts into classes.
Subsection Modality
Another dimension along which texts can be classified is modality, discussed in Chapter 5, in particular the large-scale distinction between written and spoken language, but also the distinctions within these modalities (written language may be handwritten, printed, displayed on a computer screen, etc.; spoken language may be transmitted face-to-face or via telephone, etc.). Both the broad distinction between speech and writing and the more specific communication channels influence the structural properties of the language produced. Written language tends to use longer and more complex sentences and a more diverse vocabulary than spoken language, there are certain routines and fixed expressions that are typical of a particular channel, such as the fact that people often identify themselves by name at the beginning of a telephone conversation, but not when writing a letter, the fact that letters, but not telephone conversations, typically close with a phrase like yours sincerely or best regards and the writer’s name, etc. Sometimes, these linguistic structures become conventionalized and thus define a particular genre (the term is used for spoken and written language in linguistics) — telephone calls and letters can both be said to constitute genres, which are defined, in part, by the medium in which they occur.
Subsection Register
A third dimension frequently used in classifying texts is register. Like genre, the term is used in slightly different ways by different researchers, but it generally refers to the way that the situation in which a text is produced and the relationship between Speaker and Hearer influence the linguistic structure of the text. One important aspect of register is the dimension of formality — there are words and grammatical structures that Speakers consider formal, i.e., suitable for professional rather than personal situations, and there are those they consider informal, i.e., suitable for personal situations. In the texts discussed above, we see signals of formality in the encyclopedia article (for example, the word device rather than thing, the phrase to the diameter of rather than the size of, or the fact that many passive clauses are used), and also in the recipe (for example, the subjunctive if an apple corer be handy instead of …is handy). In the excerpt from the novel, we see signals of informality, particularly in the passages of quoted speech (such as the phrase How about some… (line 1) rather than Can I offer you… or Would you like…, I think (line 5) rather than In my opinion and pick out (line 8) rather than select. Again, we can see register as one factor characterizing a given genre — encyclopedia articles are a genre characterized by a formal register, conversations between grandmothers and grandchildren are characterized by an informal register.
Subsection Topic
A fourth dimension that is sometimes used to classify texts is topic. This is a useful dimension in many applied contexts — for example, internet search engines can serve results of a better quality if they are able to group web sites according to topic —, but it is not really a useful dimension in linguistics. The texts discussed here all overlap heavily in terms of topic — all of them are about coring and baking apples —, but beyond the trivial fact that, because of this, they all contain words like bake, apple, and corer, they have nothing in common that would need to be described from a linguistic perspective, and genres are rarely restricted to a particular topic except in the most general way (such as the fact that recipes are about the preparation of food).
Subsection
CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0. Written by Anatol Stefanowitsch
