Generic and Rhetorical Structures of Texts: Two Sides of the Same Coin?

Abstract Two major approaches to textual macro-structures have been developed during the last decades: Register & Genre Theory (R>) and Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Both stress that textual structures co-occur with contextual relations involving social action and subject matter, role structure and symbolic organization. The approaches, however, significantly differ in their conceptions of textual organization. Whereas R> conceives of texts as goal-oriented staged (i.e. linearly progressing, while still allowing for prosodic and recursive realizations of stages) interactions, RST conceptualises them as hierarchically structured entities in which certain elements are foregrounded (nuclei) and others are backgrounded (satellites). Based on empirical analyses of Viennese university students’ essays, we will discuss in what ways generic and rhetorical organizations of texts relate to each other and what advances a combination of these two approaches may offer for text analysis and text linguistics. Through such a combinatory approach to analyzing texts, it becomes possible to identify systematic patterns of textual features in context (using R>) and culturally influenced, semantic coherence relations (using RST). Central to our discussion are issues involving the relation between hierarchical versus linear perspectives on text organization and the relation between cohesion and coherence.