Genre

Abstract

How is it that mass audiences often understand messages in remarkably similar ways, even though these audiences consist of many individuals, all of whom have to process these messages in their own unique cognitive environments? The answer is that just as people are very good in assessing what activity-type (Goffman) they are about to be involved in (visiting a museum, having a meeting with colleagues, going for dinner, attending a wedding), they are usually well aware of the genre of a discourse they are confronted with. Thanks to various genre-markers, they come to this awareness often even before they encounter the discourse itself. This awareness enormously steers and constrains people’s search for relevance in a discourse. Therefore, genre serves as an “interface” that greatly narrows down the infinitely large storehouse of knowledge, emotions, and attitudes that could theoretically be evoked by a discourse to the small subset of these that are directly relevant. Discourse genre, which in this chapter is taken to be equivalent to discourse type, is thereby the single most important pragmatic principle governing the interpretation of mass-communicative messages. This chapter discusses several sources on genre to support this view, discusses the importance of prototype theory for the notion of genre, and demonstrates how the importance of genre can be accommodated in classic RT.