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The focus of t he present article is on text types characterizable with the help of text-internal criteria. In the classification ofauthentic texts it seems expedient to distinguish two parallel levels of types, and a fwo-level model is thus suggestedfor the typological analysis of texts. Hence, from the viewpoint of text production, the choice of what in the article is referred to äs 'discourse type' -connected with the purpose of discourse -affects the whole strategy of the text. The term 'text type', again, is here reserved to the same sort of categories but on a level closer to the actual texts. The superordinate discourse type need not always be realized through the corresponding text type. An apparent mismatch of a discourse type and the corresponding text type may be accountedfor in terms of notions such äs the 'direct' and 'indirect' } or 'primary' and 'secondary' uses of various text types. This suggests that text types can be ranged on a scale according t o the ease with which they may serve different types of discourse. Viewing text types from the perspective of their primary and secondary use and t he extent to which they may be used indirectly further raises the possibility of a 'basic' type of text. This Status is tentatively assigned to narrative -a hypothesis that other characteristics ofthis text type seem to support, rather than reject.

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The concern of this chapter is with two different kinds of categorizations of text and discourse: text/discourse types and genres. In the study of text/discourse types, the emphasis has traditionally been on the first member of the reflexive text-context pair of notions. Investigations of genres, again, have tended to shift the focus increasingly onto its second member. It is shown that there is added value in taking into account both genre dynamics and text/discourse types, each in their own right, in studies of variation across texts and discourses. A two-level model separating text types from discourse types is presented, to account for apparent mismatches between the two. Direct and indirect uses of text types are analyzed in texts representing one and the same genre. The syntactic signals under attention include clause-initial adverbials, tense, and referential choices in subject position. Further, genres as social action are approached from the perspectives of emergence and change that affect their linguistic and contextual characteristics. Both text/discourse types and genres invite analyses that focus on the nexus of the linguistic, social, and cognitive dimensions of discourse; yet they disclose very different aspects of the forms and functions that are emergent in and across texts and contexts.Unauthenticated Download Date | 6/22/16 1:08 PM 54 Tuija Virtanen rizations of texts and discourses include a wide variety of syntactic, lexical, and phonological phenomena. Visuals, too, can be indicative of such categorizations, as shown, for instance, by differences in the shape of various groupings of texts. The concern of the present volume is with syntactic variation across texts and discourses, in particular as it manifests in emergent genres. The constitution and change of prototypical categories at the text-context interface has been investigated diachronically in historical linguistics, and recently also in environments such as the internet, which invites linguists to witness ongoing language change. This chapter deals with two different kinds of categorizations: text/discourse types and genres. In the study of text/discourse types, the emphasis has traditionally been on the first member of the text-context pair of notions; investigations of genres, again, have tended to shift the focus increasingly onto the second member of this reflexive pair. While text types are thus usually explored using text-internal criteria, genres are characterized in terms of text-external criteria, in terms of the two-way traffic between texts and their situational and sociocultural contexts.Text/discourse types are grounded in cognitively based, goal-oriented, formfunction relationships, which evolve through recursive and reiterative strategies and intertextual practices across contexts, thus developing into heuristics that facilitate discourse production and interpretation (see, e.g., ). The prototypical text type is the narrative. The number of identified types is usually limited to a small set. As will be argued below, fo...