The Wedding Report: A Prototypical Approach to the Study of Traditional Text Types

Traditional text types (or genres) are complex linguistic, sociocultural and cognitive phenomena that can only be analysed in flexible interdisciplinary frameworks fusing structural and process-oriented approaches and combining quantitative description with qualitative interpretation and evaluation. The theoretical and methodological implications of the prototypical text type concept which is developed in this book are explored in an exhaustive case study of a representative ( ie prototypical) the wedding report, a conventional type of news report published in local English newspapers. The distinctive contextual and textual features — situational context, text production processes, function, thematic structure, and form on the macro- and microlevel — are analysed synchronically and diachronically. The linguistic findings are integrated into a comprehensive view of the interplay between the genre as a linguistic frame and its sociocultural context. The study puts special emphasis on addressing the methodological problems arising from the inherent fuzziness of traditional text types, and can thus serve as a detailed working model of genre analysis, designed to be adapted to the specific requirements of similar studies.