ABSTRACT
Genre is a description of the structure of a text and results from the culture and situation of the discourse participants. Topics are closely associated with genres, and only certain topics are likely to appear in certain genres. Topic and genre together select the language of a text. Certain kinds of words and grammatical forms are likely to appear with certain genres. For example, discourse markers such as “well” and “umhmm,” and tag questions (“… isn’t it?,” “doesn’t she,” and so on) are much more likely to occur in conversational genres than in written academic genres.
