Conventions and Mutual Expectations — understanding sources for web genres

Genres can be understood in many different ways. They are often perceived as a primarily sociological construction, or, alternatively, as a stylostatistically observable objective characteristic of texts. The latter view is more common in the research field of information and language technology. These two views can be quite compatible and can inform each other; this present investigation discusses knowledge sources for studying genre variation and change by observing reader and author behaviour rather than performing analyses on the information objects themselves. 1 Genres are not rule-bound A useful starting point for genre analysis is viewing genres as artifacts. Genres are instrumental categories, useful for author and reader alike in forming the understanding of a text and in providing the appropriate intellectual context for information acquired through it. Genre distinctions are observable in terms of whom a text is directed to, how it is put together, made up, and presented. Recognising genres or detecting differences between genres is typically done by identifying stylistic differences with respect to any number of surface characteristics: presence or preponderance of linguistic items, treatment of topical entities, organisation of informational flow, layout characteristics, etcetera. This type of stylistic or non-topical variation can be observed on many levels, and is by no means orthogonal or independent to topical variation — quite to the contrary, it shows strong dependence on subject matter as well as on expected audience and many other contextual characteristics of the communicative situation. Given a communicative situation, systematical and predictable choices made by the author with respect to possible stylistic variation eases the task of the reader and helps organise the discourse appropriately for the conceivable tasks at hand. Guidelines for stylistic deliberation can similarly function as a support for authors, as an aid for making some of the many choices facing an author: giving defaults where no obvious alternatives are known and granting preferences where many alternatives seem equivalent. 1 Cf. Santini: “... cultural objects created to meet and streamline communicative needs.”[12] 2 Or other information object: the obvious generalisations are to be assumed in the