The term discourse type is preferred to other labels which might be encountered in linguistics, such as text-type or genre since, for some, text-type implies work on written texts, whereas much of CADS has been carried out on spoken discourse, and genre is a term which is accompanied by huge baggage in literature, and some of the discourse types we may wish to examine might not meet everyone’s criteria of what constitutes a “genre”. For instance, Parliamentary debates on the Iraq war, White House press briefings, or the speeches of Silvio Berlusconi, all objects of recent Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) scrutiny, may not be classifiable as separate genres.
Famous quotes containing the words discourse and/or types:
“Moralists love to discourse on the hollowness of success; about the hollowness of failure they are silent.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“The bourgeoisie loves so-called “positive” types and novels with happy endings since they lull one into thinking that it is fine to simultaneously acquire capital and maintain one’s innocence, to be a beast and still be happy.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)