ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the application of the functional linguistic concept of ‘genre’ to multimodal documents—that is, to documents whose total meaning is constructed out of combinations of text, layout, and graphics/images. Although the term genre has been used with respect to multi-modal documents for many years, this use has generally relied on the everyday dictionary sense of the term as inherited, in an increasingly weakened form, from traditions of literary analysis and rhetoric. Here we relate genre to the more formally specified and technical usage of linguistics and, particularly, of functional linguistics. We show how the phenomenon of multi-modality requires an extension of the term, not only over and above traditional usages but also with respect to the more technical constructs hitherto employed within linguistics. Our particular motivation in attempting this extension in the meaning of genre is as follows. Genre within functional linguistics attempts to provide a theoretical mechanism that is both predictive and explanatory. Membership of some text in a genre allows firm predictions to be made concerning the linguistic details of that text and, conversely, the occurrence of particular combinations of linguistic features can in turn be a strong indicator of genre membership. This, coupled with the now common interpretation of genre as a socially significant activity, provides a theoretically and practically useful link between social context and language.
