Genre, Register, Discursive Formation and Corpus

The concepts of genre & register occur throughout both sociolinguistics & sociology of language. Pierre Achard, radically, created a conceptual break between what he defined as register, & as discursive genre, associating both with a new viewpoint on discursive formation. In the absence of single, reiterated definitions, each of these concepts may be approached using the multiple defining uses which one can observe. Rather than taking a sterile historical view, this article proposes an argued construction of the definitions of these concepts. It thus aims to make them easier to handle by exploring their real-life, productive use. Genre, discursive register, discursive formation & corpus form a complex grouping of inter-related concepts. Register is defined as an accumulation of associable texts; this associability is constructed in viewpoints which draw on the regulated system of social relationships. The corpus, from an analytical viewpoint, draws on a hypothesis of register. Genre, an uneven repartition of language forms, is an internal characterization based on linguistic elements representing unmarked forms of a register. Discursive formation is simultaneously a structuring of social space by the differentiation of discourses & the structure of the lines of force which bear on genre, register & meaning. References. Adapted from the source document.