The role of discursive structure in the genre specification of online discourses

Abstract

The paper starts with the assumption that each time people engage in discourses, they perform social actions in order to adaptively satisfy their communicative purposes and needs (cf. Verschueren–Brisard 2009; Steen 2011; Giltrow 2013). Moreover, these social actions form types in accordance with the typical co-occurrences of typical discourse situations involving typical roles, typical themes and typical communicative goals tar- geted by discourse participants (cf. Bakhtin 1986). These typical co-occurrences serve as ground for the functioning of genre knowledge and result in typical patterns of construal.

In this paper, I present a two-pronged empirical study that reveals the role of discursive structure in the creation of the genre-specific character of online discourses. By discursive structural units, I mean discourse segments (usually larger than one sentence but smaller than the entire discourse) used by the speaker to accomplish a communicative strategy aimed at achieving a more specific communicative purpose. During the research, I used two types of data. On the one hand, I compiled a research corpus consisting of 50 online recipes and 50 online book reviews in Hungarian. On the other hand, I conducted an experiment in which one group of Hungarian native speaker informants (25 persons) had to create a recipe for a good novel, while another group of informants (25 persons) had to write a review of a given recipe. The research thus focused on the genres of recipe and (book) review. I performed corpus-based qualitative analyses on both datasets using the MAXQDA software. After carefully developing a data-driven annotation system on a smaller pilot material, I systematically identified the communicative strategic units of both the non-elicited and the elicited dataset [cf. Swales’s (1990) move structure analysis]. The research findings are as follows: (i) Discursive structure formed by the speaker’s communicative strategies is a genre-marking quality of the online discourses under study. (ii) Recipes written by laypersons and professionals do not have a different discursive structure but the identified discursive structure is very clearly manifested. (iii) Book reviews written by lay readers differ significantly from those written by professional critics in terms of discursive structure and this sharp differentiation reveals a separation between two more specific genres, i.e. amateur book review and professional critique.