Metapragmatics and genre: Connecting the strands

Abstract

Genre analysis involves at least a foray into the social/contextual dimension framing genre-exemplars. One way to explore this dimension is drawing on the concept of metapragmatics, which is primarily associated with (American) linguistic anthropology. However, with a few exceptions, genre studies have not consistently operationalized metapragmatics, either theoretically or practically. The purpose of this article is, therefore, to explore one possible angle of such operationalization by means of studying discourse fragments reflecting on fragments of (these very or other) discourses (so-called metapragmatic discourses) vis--vis any generic properties of the reflected discourse. Specifically, we analyzed comments sections for a number of YouTube videos exemplifying several lifestyle genres. The results indicate that generic references can range from simply using a generic label to refer to the discourse in question (as a token of a certain type/genre) to actually discussing the generic characteristics of the genre it instantiates, as well as projecting certain (generic) metapragmatic stances. Another observation is that different wordings used by the discourse community to refer to generic models can be, as it were, proper generic labels, but they can also be words and phrases that would hardly qualify as proper names of genres from an analysts point of view. Both these proper and other - genre-like - labels are also often used in conjunction with or are replaced by other ways of metapragmatically referring to what the speaker does or even what they are in/by dint of using the discourse in question. This suggests that any generic labels or cues are just part of a large pool of other possible metapragmatic meanings, knowledge, and ideologies circulating in discourse communities. More broadly, the results may indicate that genre studies should see genre as an even less stabilized entity because what a genre is depends on what people who actually use it make of it, as well as augment their standard toolkits with methods aimed at exploring metapragmatic discourse.

Are We on Our Own or Pressed into ein Kollektiv? The Keyword Pragmatic Trajectory in the German Public and Political Discourse: Corpus-Driven Discourse Analysis

“…However, we agree with the CDA focus on pragmatic aspects and the basic perspective, that discourse analysis should reveal critical language awareness, sensitivity for discourse as subject to implicit meanings, evaluation and value-attribution. Thus, we follow linguistic pragmatic stream in discourse analysis underlining that discourse is the pragmatic process of meaning negotiation (Blommaert, 2005. p. 3, for discussion see also Chernyavskaya, 2020a;Chernyavskaya 2020b;Molodychenko& Spitzmüller, 2021;Nefedov, 3 Our translation. The original reads: "Zum einen tritt Schlagwortbedeutung bei den meisten Wörtern erst hinzu, wenn sich der entsprechende Diskurs abzeichnet; Schlagwörter sind nur zum Teil diskursspezifische Prägungen (z.…”