Working with genre: A pragmatic perspective

A number of different approaches to genre analysis have emerged in recent years. The two main approaches which dominate the literature are those based on the work of systemic functional linguists and those based on the work of John Swales. Whilst both approaches to genre analysis offer important perspectives on the notion of genre, neither, as yet, has provided, within a single integrated framework, a model for genre analysis which incorporates both social and cognitive aspects of language comprehension and production. This paper is an attempt to integrate these factors into a framework for genre analysis and aims to account for them, and for the relationship between them, in the perception and production of communicative events as instances of particular genres. The key to this description, it is argued, lies in a pragmatic perspective on the notion of genre based on the concepts of prototype, intertextuality and inheritance. © 1995.