Motivated by the need to explore the introductory sections of textbooks, the present study attempted to scrutinize three realizations of academic introductions, namely, Preface, Introduction, and Foreword in terms of their functions and potential generic structures in light of Swales’s (1990) views of genre. Moreover, the study aimed to investigate genre-mixing as an interdiscursivity element a...

Scientific writing is a general label with a great deal of variation at any period. Empirical evidence of variation within genres of the early periods has been produced by studies of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, as they have shown that umbrella categories like ‘religious treatises’ or ‘scientific writing’ contain very heterogeneous texts (Meurman-Solin 1993, Taavitsainen 1993, 1994a). ...

We argue for a systematic analysis of one particular, well structured domain—academic Web pages—with regard to a special class of digital genres: Web genres. For this purpose, we have developed a database-driven system that will ultimately consist of more than 3 000 000 HTML documents, written in German, which are the empirical basis for our research. We introduce the notions of Web genre type ...

The previous chapter reviewed three traditions of genre studies, namely, the new rhetoric, systemic functional and ESP perspectives on genre. While new rhetoric genre analyses focus on the interrelation between text and context and SFL genre studies stress the linguistic analysis of text, ESP approaches to genre take an approach that is some way between these two. This chapter extends the discu...