Abstract

One fruitful line of research has been to explore the local linguistic as well as global rhetorical patterns of particular genres in order to identify their recognizable structural identity, or what Bhatia (1999, p. 22) calls "generic integrity." In terms of methodology, to date most genre-based studies have employed one or the other of Swales's move-analytic models of text analysis to investigate whether or not the generic prototypical patterns that he has introduced exist universally. This paper, however, considers the application of the Systemic Functional (SF) theory of language to genre analysis. The paper looks, in particular, at distinctive rhetorical features of English newspaper editorials as an important public "Cinderella" genre and proposes a generic prototypical pattern of text development for editorials or what Halliday and Hasan (1989) refer to as the Generic Structure Potential (GSP) of a genre. The results of this study should benefit both genre theory and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and will be, it seems, of interest not only to applied linguists, but to those involved in education, journalism, and the media.

Keywords: genre analysis, Generic Structure Potential (GSP), Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), newspaper editorials.

Introduction

During the last 20 years, there has been an increasing interest in the study of genre both within and across various language use domains (see, e.g., Dudley-Evans, 1986; Hopkins & Dudley-Evans, 1988; Swales, 1990; Bhatia, 1993, 1999; Holmes, 1997; Williams, 1999; Henry & Roseberry, 2001, Samraj, 2002; Shaw, 2003; Halleck, & Connor, 2004; to name but a few). Genre, which has traditionally been a literary concept, has recently become a popular framework for analyzing the form and rhetorical function of non-literary discourse such as research articles, theses/dissertations, textbooks, news reports, editorials,… serving as a tool for developing educational practices in rhetoric, linguistics, composition studies, English for Specific Purposes (ESP), English for Academic Purposes (EAP), etc. This interest has, to a large extent, been motivated by the need to provide a descriptively comprehensive model of texts to be later used as a pedagogic tool to develop in non-native speakers of English an ability to use it for more effective communication. Perhaps now it is a propitious time to declare, as Candlin (1993, p. ix) puts it, that "genre is a concept that has found its time."