A Construction Grammar Approach to Genre

Abstract

This paper describes and analyses text types and genres from a Construction Grammar point of view. In doing so, it pursues a twofold aim: on the one hand, it seeks to offer a new and cognitively motivated approach to the perception and production of different genres, including their mental entrenchment and the development of new genre types. On the other hand, it wants to determine to what extent the principles of Construction Grammar can be used at a linguistic macro-level, beyond the single sentence. It will be argued that a Construction Grammar approach, though probably closely connected to the textlinguistic traditions of the 1970s and 1980s, is particularly suited to provide a fresh look at the question of genre since it does not per se prioritize language, discourse, or cognition as determining factors. Rather, a usage-based Construction Grammar approach starts with the phenomena and data and seeks to account for these within a unified formal framework. This framework is strictly non-modular and allows for the inclusion of all factors necessary to account for the observed phenomena, including those from cognition, language, and discourse, if need be. Consequently, this approach can also be described as fully integrative with respect to these three fields.