Pragmatics of Discourse

16. Taxonomies of discourse types

Jürgen Esser

This article gives an overview of major taxonomies of discourse types and their historical roots going back to the beginnings of sign theory, the Prague School and British contextualism. Therefore, discourse type is understood here in a wide sense to cover established notions like language function, register, genre and text type. The differing notions are taken care of by a metatheoretical approach.

1. Historical and conceptual framework: some important forerunners

1.1. Introduction

The variability of language use was already described in antiquity in the venerable disciplines of rhetoric and poetics. One of the classifications that has (marginally) survived in more recent taxonomies of discourse ...