ABSTRACT
Although in many recent studies of professional and academic genres, there has been strong emphasis on conventionalized or institutionalized aspects of language use, the ultimate aim of genre theory is to offer a more dynamic explanation of the way expert users of language manipulate generic conventions to achieve a variety of complex goals. Communicative behaviour in conventionalized contexts often gives rise to a number of tensions in the conceptualisation of genre, which often appear to be misconceptions, some of which are the following.
