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:hat it allows us to give due weight to both the way in whic social practice is constrained by conventions, and the potential] . for change and creativity. I shall use the term 'genre' for a relatively stable set of conven tions that is associated with, and partly enacts, a socially ratifie type of activity, such as informal chat, buying goods in a shop, job interview, a television documentary, a poem, or a scienti~ article, A genre implies not only a particular text type, but als particular processes of producing, distributing and consumin texts. For example, not only are newspaper articles and poerti~ typically quite different sons of text, but they are also produc in quite different ways (e.g, one is a collective product, one individual product), have quite different sons of distribution, and, are consumed quite differently - the latter including quite diff~f.i ent protocols for reading and interpreting them. So genre cu across .the distinction between 'description' and 'interpretation which I introduced in chapter 3. According to Bakhtin (1986: 65), genres are 'the drive bel~ from the history of society to the history of language'. Changes in social practice are both manifested on the plane of language' changes in the system of genres, and in pan brought abo~f through such changes. In referring to a system of genres, I .aIIl. applying here the principle of the primacy of orders of discour~t introduced in chapter 3: a society, or a particular institution .~r domain within it, has a particular configuration of genres ill particular relationships to each other, constituting a system. And, of course, the configuration and system are open to change. Focusing upon genre as text type, a particular genre is associated with a particular 'cornpositional structure', as Bakhtin callsi~ (1986: 60), or, in the terminology I shall use, a particular 'activio/ type' (a category I am adapting from Levinson 1979). An activity type can be specified in terms of the structured sequence of actions of which it is composed, and in terms of the participants involved in the activity - that is, the set of subject positions which. are socially constituted and recognized in connection with tht activity type. For example, the activity of buying goods from} greengrocer's shop involves 'customer' and 'shop assistant' as designated subject types, and a sequence of actions, some of which may be optional or repeated, along these lines: customer enters shop and awaits turn; shop assistant greets customer (cus-
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returns greeting, they exchange social pleasantries) and rcits purchase request; customer makes purchase request (poss~l~ preceeded by a pre-request sequence such ~s :What are ~e ·jJples like this week?' - 'Well, the Coxes are DIce ).; shop assrst gets (weighs out, packages, etc.) goods ~nd gIVes ~em to ~tomer (customer and shop assistant possibly negotiate on Iiether the goods are acceptable, whether variations in the ~e ested weight are acceptable, etc.); customer thanks shop assist; shop assistant informs customer of the cost; customer pays; op assistant gives ~hange and thanks c~stomer; cus~omer thanks 'op assistant and gives a farewell greeting: shop ?s~lstant returns :iiewell greeting. As this example shows, an. a~tlvlty ~pe o~~n delimits a range of options rather than specifying a single rtgld jJ~ttern. See Hasan's c~mtribution.s in Halliday an~ Hasan (198~) for a view of genre which emphasizes such properties of compost•onal structure. A genre tends to be asso~iated :with a par~icular style, though enres may often be compatible With alternative styl~s, for examle interviews may be 'formal' or 'informal'. Style, like the oth~r ~l'mS I am using, is difficult to pin down, and has been used !n a.rious ways. We can think of styles as varying along three main arameters, according to the Itenor', 'mode' and 'rhetorical mode' {the text, to use the terminology of systemic linguistics (Halli<lay 1978). Firstly, styles vary according ~o tenor, that is, ?~cord ing to the son of relationship that ~btams betw~en participants ill an interaction. So we can classify styles With such terms a.s 'formal', 'informal', 'official', 'intimate', 'casual', and so on. Secondly, styles vary according to mode, ac~or~ing to whether texts are written or spoken or some combination of the two (e.g. written-to-be-spoken, written-as-if-spoken,. spoken-as-ify;ritten). So we can classify styles as spoken, wntten, s~oke~ as-if-written and so forth, We can also use terms which m part reflect ~ode but in pan reflect tenor, or genre, or disc<,Jurse, such as 'conversational', 'formal written', 'informal written', ;~cademic', 'journalistic', and so forth. Thir~ly, s~les vary according to rhetorical mode, and can be classified With terms such as 'argumentative', 'descriptive', and 'expository'. -The most autonomous of the types of element (other than genre) is 'discourse' (see Kress 1988; Kress .and Threadg~ld 1988 on the relationship between 'genre' and 'discourse'). Discourses