Université de Montréal - Thèse sous forme numérique

152.1.2. GenresAccording to Gémar (2008) legal texts have three characteristics that make themdifferent from other kinds of texts: norms, legal terminology and genre-bound style ofwriting. Since the previous section addressed the most important characteristics of legallanguage, it is now necessary to concentrate on the discursive side of legal language andreview the notion of ―genre‖ which has been considered relevant for corpus-buildingand terminology interpretation. The genre approach alongside with the sublanguageapproach (Hoffmann 1985) can offer a perspective and a description apparatus toaccount for domain-specific communication. As Engberg (2010) explains, instead oflooking at the subject of the text when defining the sublanguage, the point of departurein the genre analysis approach is primarily the situation and function of the text.2.1.2.1. Definition of genreThe notion of ―genre‖ has been discussed in a wide range of areas, including folklorestudies (Propp 1969), literary theory (Bakhtin 1986; Fowler 1982), the sociology oflanguage (Bergmann and Luckmann 1995; Guenthner and Knoblauch 1995), appliedlinguistics (Adam 1999; Biber 1988; Biber 1993), discourse analysis (Bhatia 1993;Maingueneau 1998; Rastier 1989; Swales 1990), just to name a few. In the literature ofapplied linguistics and discourse analysis, the terms genre, discourse type and text type 1have sometimes been used interchangeably, this reflecting different theoreticalperspectives as well as the development of the research in this area. For instance,Anglo-Saxon scholars did not usually differentiate between genre and text type until thework of Biber (1988).1 German-speaking scholars have used an even wider range of terms: Textsorte, Gattung, Texttyp,Textform and Fachtextsorte (cf. Gläser 1990).