Bhatia-interdiscursivity_in_critical_genre_analysis精品.pdfVIP

INTERDISCURSIVITY IN CRITICAL GENRE ANALYSIS Vijay K. BHATIA (City University of Hong Kong) ABSTRACT: Although it is generally accepted that pr ofessional genres are better understood and analyzed in terms of the professional practices that they invariably co-construct in specific contexts, in genre literature, they are often analyzed in isolation, thus undervaluing the role and function of interdiscursivity in professional genres. This paper will draw on a number of professional contexts and argue for a closer study of interdiscursivity to facilitate a more comprehensive and critical understanding of discursive and professional practices. KEYWORDS: genre; discourse; professional practice. 1. Introduction Text and context have been assigned varying importance in the analysis of professional genres. In the early conceptualizations of genre the focus was more centrally on text, and context played a relatively less important background role. However, in more recent versions of genre analysis context has been assigned a more important role, redefining genre as a configuration of text-internal and text-external resources, thus highlighting two kinds of relationships involving texts and contexts. Interrelationships within and across texts focusing primarily on text-internal properties are viewed as intertextual in nature, whereas interactions within and across genres involving primarily text-external resources may be viewed as interdiscursive in nature. Intertextuality has been given considerable attention in discourse and genre theory; inte