Introductory genres in virtual settings: a (re) analysis of communicative purposes

Abstract

In this paper we re-examine the concept of communicative purpose, derived from socio-rhetorical genre analysis, and apply it to the study of introductory genres of academic books presented in digital form. The research, which is theoretically based on Swales (1990, 2004), Bhatia (1997a, 2004) and Bezerra (2006), investigates a corpus of 50 exemplars of digital introductory genres collected from sites of publishing companies and specialized bookstores. The results show that when moved from the printed mode to a virtual support, these genres face visible transformations in terms of communicative purposes. In particular, the typical academic discourse used in these genres tends to make room to a strongly marked promotional discourse, characterizing a process of colonization of genres by other genres and discourses (BHATIA, 2004).