ABSTRACT
Language, including the ‘languages’ of film or painting or music, makes possible the generation of a potentially infinite number of unique utterances. In practice, however, the utterances that we produce tend to look similar in some but not every respect to other utterances; they are partial repetitions of a kind. This is to say that language is systemically organised not only at the level of phonetics or syntax but also at the level of use. The production of speech or writing is not a free flow of utterances but is shaped and constrained by the norms of rhetorical appropriateness that I have called genre. As Todorov puts it, ‘any verbal property, optional at the level of language, may be made obligatory in discourse; the choice a society makes among all the possible codifications of discourse determines what is called its system of genres’ (Todorov 1990: 10).
