ABSTRACT
So far I have treated the category of genre more or less as though it were obviously and naturally realised in language, either in speech or in writing. Much of the work done over the last twenty or thirty years assumes that genres are linguistic phenomena. Yes, film, or video and television, have been described by using this category, and of course they consist of much more than ‘just’ language. And literary texts have been described in genre-terms for a very long time. But in the broad area of literacy the work that underpins the interest in genre treats it as a purely linguistic phenomenon. This needs to be expanded a bit by saying that the assumption that genre is a linguistic category does not really surface into explicitness: it is simply there. Yet as so many of the text-objects in the contemporary world — as my example of the small card in the previous chapter — make use of modes other than speech or writing, or make use of many modes at the same time, the question must arise of whether ‘genre’ is a category that applies to texts or text-like objects realised in other modes, in image, gesture, 3D representations, or in relation to multi-modally constituted texts. Is genre a linguistic category first and foremost, or most plausibly? Or is it a category that applies to all forms of representation and communication?
