Communicative purpose in genre analysis

Abstract

Based on the genre theory known as the British School, or the socio-rhetorical approach, this paper aims to discuss the concept of communicative purpose, viewed as an important criterion for genre study. The discussion focuses on the definition of communicative purpose as presented by Swales (1990) and later reviewed by Askehave and Swales (2001) and Swales (2004), who discusses the use of purpose not as a criterion for the immediate identification of genre, but, according to an analysis grounded on the social settings, as a resulting discovery of the process of analysis itself. Viewing communicative purpose this way, one seeks to establish safe procedures for the recognition of the status of a genre at the end of the research, while maintaining the relevance of the concept as a criterion of analysis.