## Communicative Purpose as Genre Determinant

## Abstract

Through the years researchers and LSP teachers alike have used various parameters for classifying texts. This article sets out to discuss the notion of 'communicative purpose' as a means for classifying text. It points to some of the difficulties associated with the functional  approaches  to  genre  classification  in  general  and  the  notion  of  'communicative purpose' in particular.

## 1. Introduction

'The urge to classify is fundamental', Miller says in her 1984 article 'Genre as Social Action'. This fundamental urge is also apparent when dealing with texts. The last thirty years have seen a growing interest in the classification of texts. It began in the 1960s when researchers like M.A.K. Halliday - in an attempt to react against Chomskyan formalism -  began to study variations of language and to categorise these variations according to linguistic properties (Halliday et al. 1964) and later according to situational dimensions (Halliday 1978).

Through  the  years  different  parameters  for  classifying  texts  have been used. Thus researchers have been trying to group texts according to:

1. Linguistics features (e.g. Tarone et al 1981, Henderson & Hewings 1987, Biber 1988, Salager-Meyer 1994)
2. Situational features (e.g. Halliday 1978, Halliday & Hasan 1989)
3. Functional features (e.g. Swales 1990, Bhatia 1993, Eggins 1994, Eggins & Martin 1997, Martin 1985a, Martin 1992), Miller 1984) The aim of this paper is to discuss and evaluate one of the approaches

mentioned above - namely the functional approach which tries to clas- sify texts according to their functional features or ' communicative purpose '.

* Inger Askehave Engelsk Institut Handelshøjskolen i Århus Fuglesangs Allé 4 DK-8210  Århus V

## 2. Approaches to Functional Classification

The functional theories, which will be evaluated here, are those belonging to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of genre analysis. Though working independently of each other, the two researchers, Swales (1990) and Martin (1992), have come up with very similar ideas about classifying text.

Martin's framework for classifying texts (his so-called genre theory) originates from the Hallidayan systemic functional grammar and could be seen as an extension to Halliday's work on language varieties.

Martin regards genre as a:

```
'[…]  staged,  goal-oriented,  purposeful  activity  in  which  speakers engage as members of our culture' (Martin 1984: 25)
```

Martin tries to categorise language use in terms of what he calls the culturally appropriate goals speakers are trying to achieve by means of language. In his framework such goals may for instance be to describe, explain, or narrate something realised by the genres 'description', 'explanation' and 'narration'.

I have criticised Martin's use of the term genre elsewhere and shall not go into a detailed discussion of it here (see Askehave in press). Suffice to say that the factor determining genre membership is that of the goal or 'communicative purpose' of a text.

Furthermore, Martin suggests that the major linguistic reflex of 'purpose' in a text is the staging structure by which a text of a particular genre unfolds. Thus when Martin defines 'genre' as a 'staged, goal-oriented,  purposeful activity',  he  is  referring  to  the  fact  that  genres  lay down the way to go about accomplishing such purposeful activities. In other words when people try to accomplish an activity type by means of language, social convention has established that they adopt certain strategies  which  can  be  regarded  as  stages  through  which  they  move  to achieve the purpose of the interaction. The staged and goal-oriented organisation of genre is expressed linguistically through a functional

constituent structure referred to as the 'schematic structure':

'Schematic structure represents the positive contribution genre makes to a text: a way of getting from A to B in the way a given culture accomplishes whatever the genre in question is functioning to do in that culture'.

(Martin 185: 25)

However, the primary determinant of genre membership is that of 'purpose' whereas schematic structure and linguistic features are regarded as dimensions to the realisation of genres (Eggins 1994: 36).

Now let's take a look at another functional approach to genre classification developed by Swales (1990).

According to Swales (1990: 58):

'A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert members of the parent discourse community and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style'.

Again we see genres defined not as texts but rather as social or communicative events. Furthermore, the definition tries to set up a realisational relationship between the purpose accomplished by a genre and the structure of the genre and suggests that the communicative purpose of a genre shapes the genre and provides it with an internal structure a schematic structure.

At the same time it is important to note that although the definition acknowledges other characteristics of genres such as content, form, intended  audience,  medium  etc.,  it  classifies  texts/language  use  as  belonging to particular genres on the basis of functional criteria i.e. the communicative purpose.

'Communicative purpose is both a privileged criterion and one that operates  to  keep  the  scope  of  a  genre  as  here  conceived  narrowly focused  on  comparable  rhetorical  action.  In  addition  to  purpose, exemplars of a genre exhibit various patterns of similarity in terms of structure, style, content and intended audience. If all high probability expectations are realized, the exemplar will be viewed as prototypical by the parent discourse community'.

Swales (1990: 58)

Both frameworks have been widely applied by scholars making genre analyses of every day texts as well as LSP texts. In some cases the prac- tical application of the genre theories has thrown light on some of the uncertainties or problems which the theories present.

Bhatia (1993), who bases his genre analyses on Swales' framework, claims for example that promotion letters and job applications belong to the  same  genre  because  the  overall  communicative  purpose  of  both texts is to promote something (be it a product, company or person). On the other hand one might argue that Bhatia's 'communicative purpose' is too general as it results in groupings of texts which - only at a very general level - can be said to serve the same purpose. Another point for discussion has been that of the criteria used for identifying the schematic structure of genres i.e. whether a move or stage in a schematic structure can be determined by the content of the move, grammatical or lexical patterns or functional features of the move (Paltridge 1994).

However, as far as I know, no one has questioned the rather slippery notion of 'communicative purpose' which - as we have just seen - is used  as  the  primary  determinant  of  genre-membership  in  both  approaches. The rest of this article will, therefore, address the notion of 'communicative purpose' and point to some of the difficulties  associated with the use of the term for classifying texts.

## 3. Communicative Purpose

Even  though  the  notion  of  'communicative  purpose'  plays  a  fundamental role in the two genre theories a clear definition and thorough discussion of the term is difficult to find in both Martin and Swales' work.

## 3.1. Swales and Communicative Purpose

In  his  book  ' Genre  Analysis' Swales  (1990)  comments  on  the  challenges and difficulties associated with the use of 'communicative purpose' as genre determinant. First of all he comments on the slippery nature of the term:

Placing the primary determinant of genre-membership on shared purpose rather than on similarities of form or some other criterion is to take  a  position  that  accords  with  that  of  Miller  (1984)  or  Martin (1985a). The decision is based on the assumption that, except for a few interesting and exceptional cases, genres are communicative vehicles for the achievement of goals. At this juncture, it may be objected that purpose is a somewhat less overt and demonstrable feature than, say, form and therefore serves less well as a primary criterion. However, the fact that purposes of some genres may be hard to get at is itself of considerable heuristic  value.  Stressing  the  primacy  of  purpose  may require  the  analyst  to  undertake  a  fair  amount  of  independent  and open-minded investigation,  thus  offering  protection  against  a  facile classification based on stylistic feature and inherited beliefs, such as typifying research articles as simple reports of experiments'.

(Swales 1990: 46)

Furthermore, he comments on the difficulties of identifying the communicative purpose of a genre and the need in some cases to work with sets of purposes:

'While news broadcasts are doubtless designed to keep their audiences up to date with events in the world (including verbal events), they may also have purposes of moulding public opinion, organizing public behaviour (as in an emergency), or presenting the controllers and paymaster of the broadcasting organization in a favorable light'. (Swales 1990: 47)

However,  a  clear  definition  of  the  phenomenon  of  'communicative purpose' is difficult to find. Such a definition would, however, be very relevant as Swales seems to introduce two types of communicative purpose in his definition: what I shall refer to here as the 'official' communicative purpose and the 'hidden' communicative.

For example when he characterises the purpose of news broadcasts as being that of keeping their audiences up to date with events in the world, he seems to talk about what I suggest we call the 'official' purpose of news broadcasts the generally socially acceptable purpose of news broadcasts. However, at the same time Swales argues that the purpose of a news broadcasts may also be to mould public opinion, organising public behaviour or presenting the controllers and paymaster of the broadcasting organisation in a favourable light. Thus here the purpose of the text could be characterised as the 'hidden' purpose a more covert  purpose  which  is  not  necessarily  accepted  or  known  by  all users of the genre.

The same distinction applies when Swales accounts for the purpose of  research  articles  where  he  says  that  '[..]  it  remains  the  case  that research articles are rarely simple narratives of investigations. Instead, they are complexly distanced reconstructions of research activities, at least part of this reconstructive process deriving from a need to anti- cipate and discountenance negative reactions to the knowledge claims being advanced ' (Swales 1990: 175 my emphasis).

My point is that Swales never comments on the distinction which I would argue exists between the official and the hidden purposes of a text. And as we shall see later such a distinction is quite important if we use the term 'communicative purpose' as genre determinant.

## 3.2. Martin and Communicative Purpose

Martin's use of the term 'communicative purpose' is problematic in a slightly different way. In Martin (1992) the following characterisation of 'telos' (communicative purpose) can be found:

'It should be stressed here that bringing telos into contextual theory at this point in no way implies that the text is being interpreted as the realisation of speaker's intentions; genres are social processes, and their purpose is being interpreted here in social, not psychological terms'. (Martin 1992: 503)

Thus here we see that Martin explicitly declares that he is not interested in what goes on in the mind of the speaker. In other words he is not concerned  with  the  fact  that  news  broadcasts  may  serve  other  purposes apart from that of 'keeping their audiences up to date with events in the world'. He regards 'telos' or 'communicative purpose' as a purely 'social phenomenon'.

However,  the  problem  here  is  that  the  social  phenomena  which Martin refers, to are rather limited and general. The reason is that when Martin talks about genres/social processes he tends to equal his concept of 'genre' and the concept of 'text types' (such as 'descriptions', 'explanations', 'instructions', etc.) as used in other European text linguistic traditions such as Werlich (1976).

```
'It is important to note […] that the term 'letter' refers to a mode and not a genre'. (Martin 1985b: 17)
```

## And he continues:

'This distinction between the purpose of a text (genre) and the way in which it is transmitted (mode) is an important one because so many of our folk linguistic terms confuse mode and genre. Letters to the editor for example are usually hortatory expositions sent through the mail and have much more in common with sermons and political speeches than with other types of letter'. (Martin 1985b: 17)

Consequently, his concern with the goal or communicative purpose of texts as social phenomena tends to limit itself to what he calls the 'social' purpose of text types (such as to describe, explain, instruct, etc.).

Therefore, when Martin sets out to explain what the purpose of texts is - why we say this or that on a particular occasion his account usually restricts itself to a small group of about six or seven different rhetorical purposes such as to narrate, to inform, to instruct, etc. These purposes are then realised linguistically in six or seven text types such as the  narrative,  informative,  instructional,  etc.  text  types  (for  a  more extensive criticism of this see Askehave (in press).

The strange thing is, however, that in some cases one can in fact find examples of 'purposes' in Martin's work which tend to equal what I would call 'hidden' purposes. For example Eggins and Martin (1997) comment on a public talk given by Chomsky and refer to this text as having  the  purpose  of  'delivering  social  commentary'  or  simply 'stirring'. Such purposes are definitely different from the purposes of text types mentioned above and closer to what Swales to some extent seems to understand by 'communicative purposes'.

## 4. Communicative Purpose as Genre Determinant

The absence of a clear consensus as to what communicative purpose is and - if we finally decide what we understand by 'communicative purpose' - the fact that sets  of  purposes may be associated with a text makes it very difficult to use the concept as a tool for categorising texts and for analysing texts in general.

Let me illustrate this difficulty. In my Ph.D-thesis (Askehave 1998) I  try  to  establish what the purpose of a company brochure is. Not in order  to  categorise  the  text  as  such  but  -  inspired  by  the  theories  of Martin and Swales about communication being a purposeful activity in order to look at the company brochure as a '[…] staged, goal-oriented, purposeful activity in which speakers engage as members of our culture' (Martin 1984: 25). However, before embarking on a thorough analysis, I consulted literature concerned with the purpose of company brochures. In Bhatia's genre analysis (Bhatia 1993: 59), which is based on Swales framework, the company brochure is regarded as a 'promotional genre' and according to Bhatia the communicative purpose is that of  'promoting  something'  (in  this  case  the  company).  However,  the problem with this definition is that it is so general that it does not contribute much to the description of the genre as an intentional and purposeful activity from the view of the sender.

In my thesis, however, I was interested in taking a closer look at why companies write a company brochure what their 'hidden' intentions behind a brochure could be apart from the 'official' one of promoting the  company.  So  inspired  by  the  basis  tenets  of  systemic  functional linguistics (namely that the cultural and situational context adds meaning and purpose to a text), I suggest in my thesis that if we want to find out  what  the  purpose  of  a  text  is,  we  have  to  consult  the  context  in which the text is used.

Thus in order to move beyond the obvious purpose of 'promoting something'  and  to  deduct  what  the  company  is  trying  to  achieve through its promotion, we have to turn to the industrial market and the goals and intentions of the participants in the industrial market.

And only by studying the participants both the sender and the receiver of the company brochures we can begin to get an idea of the purpose of a company brochure. Furthermore, we may realise that there may be more than one purpose to a company brochure and that the purposes  which  we  deduct  depend  on  the  values  and  attitudes  of  those doing business in the industrial market.

The two company brochures studied in my thesis are from a dairy ingredient manufacturer and a packaging manufacturer. Both texts are primarily  used  as  promotional  material  in  the  industrial  market.  My analysis of the cultural context of the industrial market is based on a Swedish theory of sociology the  so-called  Network  approach.  The Network approach suggests that the establishment of long-lasting trading relationships is paramount in today's industrial market thus being able to cooperate is an essential tool and a highly valued asset. It follows from this that one of the main marketing objectives is to present the company as a qualified partner. Here the company brochure plays an important role. Even though the brochures cannot establish partnerships in themselves, they can facilitate the establishment by presenting the company as a qualified partner . It should also be added here that my linguistic studies of the brochures reflected such a purpose; namely the purpose of presenting the company as a qualified partner. I.e. the choice of words and grammatical structures made in the text emphasised the qualities of a great and reliable business partner.

Thus we see that by studying the context of a text and not least the participants in this context we end up being able to say something about the wide range of hidden purposes which people also intend to realise by means of a text (whether in fact the receiver 'gets the message' is a completely different story which I shall not go into here). Such 'hidden' purposes may for example be:

- to mould public opinion
- to create an image of a reliable business partner
- to obtain financial support
- etc.

What those hidden' purposes have in common is that:

- they cannot be assigned to one particular genre (we can try to form partnerships by means of a wide range of genres such as annual reports, letters, advertisements, etc.)
- they  are  extremely  subjective  (my  purpose  of  writing  a  research article may by different from yours)
- and they are indefinite; there may be fifty reasons for publishing a company brochure for example.

The last point leads me to address the question of the multifunctionality of texts (which also illustrates the difficulty in connection with using communicative purpose as genre determinant). Texts seldom fulfil one function only. Swales' analyses of research articles (Swales 1990) and my analyses of company brochures (Askehave 1998) are good examples of that. I would certainly refrain from assigning one purpose to a text. The reason is that, as mentioned above, the purpose of a text is subjective.  My  reason  for  producing  a  text  may  be  very  different  from yours-   it  depends  on  the  person  writing  the  text  and  the  context  in which he finds himself.

## 5. Conclusion

As the reader may have realised by now I am not particularly happy with the concept of 'communicative purpose' as genre determinant. I find Swales' use of the term problematic because if we say, as we saw in the case of Bhatia's work that the purpose of a genre is 'to promote something'  and  thus  uses  the  term  'promotional  genre'  as  a  generic category,  we  end  up  defining  company  brochures,  job  applications, tourist promotion, magazine advertisements and book blurbs (and why not research articles?) as instances of the same genre the promotional genre -  and consequently are stuck with extremely broad genre categories. At the same time the notion of communicative purpose is problematic because if we accept that genres serve different purposes, according to which purpose should we categorise the text is one purpose more primary than the other? And which of the purposes can be said to have  a  linguistic  reflex  in  terms  of  realising  a  specific  schematic structure?

Martin's concept of communicative purpose is not particularly useful either. Martin acknowledges that people may have personal reasons for producing a text. However, he finds this area of speaker intention impossible to deal with and the result is that he only accounts for communicative purposes which are more or less what some of us associate with the purpose of text types . It also means that his framework is not appropriate for handling a complete genre (like for example a company brochure). Martin would split up the genre into descriptive, expository and narrative text types and deal with the purpose of those text types only (which is to describe, explain and narrate) and not the purpose of the entire brochure as such.

This paper is only meant to illustrate the problems we face if we use communicative purpose as the primary means of classifying texts . As suggested in  the  previous  sections  the  concept  is  difficult  to  use  for classifying texts because the purpose of a text is far from the reliable measuring device which genre theories seem to suggest. This does not mean, however, that I suggest the phenomenon should be left alone and should not be dealt with at all. As a matter of fact I find it to be one of the most interesting aspects of text analysis namely that of trying to find out what the intention behind a particular text is.

Well, what about our fundamental urge to classify things then?

I cannot suggest the one and only method for classifying texts. As mentioned at the beginning of this article parameters of 'language', 'situation' and 'function' are all important aspects of language use and should  all  be  dealt  with  when  doing  text  analysis.  And  perhaps  we ought to attach equal importance to all three parameters when clasifying texts instead of placing primary emphasis one of them. Or maybe we should accept that language use is simply one of those things that cannot be pigeonholed and therefore be satisfied with making thorough analyses of separate instances of language use.

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