Genre Analysis and the Identification of Textual Boundaries

Recent years have seen a considerable growth in the area of genre-based language studies. Many of these studies focus on levels of discourse structure which have been variously referred to in the literature as the 'schematic structure', 'generic structure', and 'generic structural potential'for a particular genre. Very little research, however, has attempted to examine the criteria that have been used for the identification of textual boundaries in genre studies. This paper examines a number of examples of genre analysis with the aim of identifying the criteria employed for the identification of textual boundaries in these studies. In doing so, it reaches the conclusion that there are non-linguistic, rather than linguistic, reasons for generic staging in texts, and that the search for structural divisions in texts should be seen as a search for cognitive boundaries in terms of convention, appropriacy, and content rather than as a search for linguistically defined boundaries.