ABSTRACT
Discourse taxonomy may have a psychological purpose, in that it provides a framework for the study of particular aspects of production and comprehension processes, such as the incidence of particular kinds of inferencing in narrative comprehension. There is an intuitive attraction, then, in adopting the prototype categorization framework as a starting point for the development of a more precise taxonomy of discourse. The medium of discourse involves linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of the material means by which a message is transmitted, and it has been studied by linguists, semioticians, and mass media scholars. There is a direct relation between genres of discourse and the definition of literature. A prototype–theoretical perspective on the classification of discourse can reveal that such genres as the novel, the poem, and the play, as well as such superordinate classes of discourse as literature, advertising, and academic writing, are all distinct classes of discourse but at different levels of abstraction.
