universidade federal de santa catarina pós-graduação em letras ...

362.2.3.1 The Generic Structure Potential of discourseIn her well known framework, Hasan (1985) incorporates text and context into thedefinition of genre as the verbal expression of the on-going social activity in a givencontext. The configuration of the context can be defined through the analysis of thecontextual variables of Field, Tenor, and Mode, as seen in Figure 2.1._______________________________________________________________________Field of discourse - the kind of act that is being carried out and its goals (praising,blaming, informing, etc.)Tenor of discourse - the agent roles: the participants (parent and child, author andreader, etc.); degree of control of one participant over another: hierarchical or nonhierarchical(friend to friend, specialist to audience, etc.); social distance: minimal ormaximal (participants have infrequent encounters, participants are known to each otheroutside that particular context, etc.)Mode of discourse: the role language is playing (constitutive or ancillary); processsharing (dialogic or monologic); channel (graphic or phonic); medium (spoken - with orwithout visual contact; or written)_______________________________________________________________________Figure 2-1 Contextual Configuration Variables (Halliday, 1985:12)Hasan argues that the specific features of a context allow us to make predictionsabout the sequence and recurrence of obligatory and optional elements in text structure(ibid.:55). She provides a circular or tautological definition of text and context wheretext is language doing some job in some context and context is the specific situation inwhich language is functioning (ibid.:56). Thus while texts can be predicted fromcontextual clues, context is construed by the set of texts produced within a specificsituation in a community. Once the Contextual Configuration (CC) is established, it is