Genre and Spoken Discourse: Probabilities and Predictions

There seem to be two distinctly different views on how to approach the analysis of texts in relation to context. One starts with an examination of context, folk-terminology for genres, perceived distance between the speakers and social factors of the participants. Goffman (1964: 133) for example lists ‘age, sex, class, caste, country of origin, generation, schooling [...]’ as social variables which determine linguistic variation. The other view is more text-based, and as Sinclair (1992) states, ‘is to expect the text to supply everything necessary for its own interpretation; what we need is not an external knowledge base but a better understanding of text structure. If we do not rely on the text itself to indicate its own interpretation, then we invoke mysterious processes for which it is difficult to find evidence’ (1992: 82).