textual genres

שפה

2022

We explain what textual genres are, how they are classified and we give you various examples. Also, what are textual typologies.

Textual genres include both everyday and literary language.

What are text genres?

The textual genres or discursive genres are, according to the theoretical proposals of the Russian language theorist and philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), a set of categories in which we can classify the different statements of the text. language, that is, the things that can be said.

Is classification includes both everyday language and that which we use for literary purposes, but we must not confuse textual genres with literary genres (that is, with the categories in which literary works are classified).

Textual genres can be understood as large forms of language that present relatively stable features, that is, they present important similarities in thematic (what it is about), the stylistic (what resources it uses) and the compositional (how it is organized). Thus, it does not matter whether we refer to statements of written language or oral: these fundamental axes always serve to recognize the discursive genre to which they belong.

As postulated by Bakhtin, these genres are distinguished by their complexity into two categories:

  • Primary or simple genera. They are those that are typical of the communication daily, both in its aspects oral What written, and in general they are spontaneous, simple, eloquent and produced with very little planning. Examples of this are street conversations, telephone greetings, text messaging or emails.
  • Secondary or complex genres. They are those that imply a greater degree of elaboration or planning, since they are the product of a more demanding communication, generally written. Examples of this are medical reports, literary works, speeches politicians or the newspaper articles.

The discursive genres can be very numerous and cover texts very different type. It is not a finite list of genres, as is the case with literary genres, but rather of a way of understanding the acts of language. Thus, greeting cards can be a genre, just like telephone greetings, as long as they comply with a certain uniformity in terms of theme, structure and style.

examples of text genres

Some examples of textual genres are:

Difference between textual genres and textual typologies

Textual genres are, broadly speaking, sets of texts organized on the basis of their common characteristics of style, content and structure, which generate a horizon of expectations for the interlocutor. Thus, for example, a joke belongs to a specific genre that allows us to anticipate the type of communicative exchange that we will have.

Instead, the textual typologies they are ways of organizing texts, that is, classification models that can meet various criteria. A textual typology, in other words, is a class of text, according to a certain classification model. There have been models for classifying texts practically since the invention of the writing, attending to specific features such as its fictional or real character, its communicative intention or its writing strategies.

For example, we can make types of texts according to their essential linguistic function, and thus distinguish between Narrative texts, descriptive, argumentative and phatics. It would be possible to include in the category of narrative texts, for example, texts from very different discursive genres, such as a joke, a sports report, an autobiography and a science fiction story, since a story is constructed in all of them.

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