What are genres in Besѣda®?

Content

Design

This is a milestone in the developement of Beseda, because this higher order structure allows participants to engage easily in more complex conversations. Based on the previous work of attention and positioning (previously turn structure), the developer implementated the foundations for conversation genres.

Issue

Early testers of the application frequently commented on the slowness of the communication process. While the slower pace is intentional as it affords the participants to focus more on their contributions, there were other related shortcomings - how to organise groups of focus spaces which share a topic? How to empower the communicating subject to plan strategically for an upcoming meeting?

Requirements

Genres are considered to be mostly historically and culturally specific, for example the research by William Hanks on 16th century colonial Yucatan. However the priority for Beseda is to start with the basic and them move to the specific.

Limitations

For genres which reconstruct the past, it is appropriate to use speech-to-text technology in order to simulate and visualise the attention of the participants. This raises the issue of confidentiality - the technology should be ran locally without transmitting streams of audio externally for processing.

Research

Academic

The starting point was Paul Drew’s article “Turn design” where he describes the usual mecanisms which are used to achieve coherence - ellipsis (leaving out meaning which is shared between participants), deixis (using contextual words such as “this”, “then”, etc) and repetition.

Whereas language needs to be standardised so that people can understand each other, genres are much more flexible and diverse. When a person speaks she constructs an imitation of her thought which is more than linguistic words and a grammatical sentence. This is clearly comprehensible in situations where there is little common knowledge and the speakers cannot leave out meaningful units from their construction.

Mikhail Bakhtin diverged from his contemporaries in his insistance that speech should be examined in its natural setting.

Bakhtin defines an utterance as a “real” unit of speech communication - delimited by the change of speaker. The boundary of the utterance complies with certain criteria:

Whether an utternace is exhausted is determined by the possibility of responding to it. Addressivity is inherent in an utterance.

Comparing this to a grammatical sentence which by iteself does not evoke a response reaction, the utterance guarantees a responsive understanding and the possibility of a response. The exhaustiveness can be absolute (in maximally standard spheres of life such as business and military) or relative (in creative spheres).

In relation to the speaker’s will - Bakthin claims it is manifested primarily by the choice of a particular speech genre. The sentences are selected from the standpoint of the whole utterance. The plan for the whole utterance may be implemented with one sentance or it may require a large number of sentences. It is precisely this significant variation which makes utterances unacceptable as units of speech to the science of linguistics. However they cannot be ignored and invite systemic research.

The repertoire of oral … speech genres is rich.

Bakhtin classified genres in two - primary and secondary according to their complexity. The primary genres are oral and used in everyday situations. The more complex secondary genres, which are often in written form, are a recreation of the primary genres. For example, the author of a secondary genre may raise questions and answer them himself, raise objections and respond to them, essentially simulating a dialogue.

Carolyn Miller expresses some fantastic definitions. She reviews the literature whereby she brings to the attention that there are recurring problems in a society for which people develop standard operating procedures.

Her perspective is that:

A genre is a rhetorical means for mediating private intentions and social exigence; it motivates by connecting the private with the public, the singular with the recurrent.

Objectively, each situation is unique and there is no recurrance. This is proof that at the center of human action is interpretation not perception. When humans are collaboratively using communication they are guided by meaning, not by physical stimuli and perceptions of it.

Consequently, Miller claims that exigence is in the social construction of reality. Exigence is a set of particular patterns and expectations that provides a socially objectified motive. It is an orientation center for joint action.

However at the time (1984) her attitude was one of extreme denial - “does not lend itself to taxonomy”, “this perspective on genre is not precise enough to permit quantification of formal features or elucidation of a complete hierarchy of rules”.

It was Günthner and Knoblauch who created a precise definition of the term genre and determined three structural levels:

They found that the (dis)preference for agreement which Pomerantz expressed, was not relevant in all contexts: some enthnicities prefer direct utterances which disagree with the previous utterances because there are in the interest of all sides.

Luckmann introduced the concept of the communicative budget:

at any particular time in any particular society the entire field of communicative genres constitutes the innermost core of the communicative dimensions of social life.

The concept of field is used in analogy to the term “semantic field”: the genres are defined by the organisation of their internal parts as well as by their systematic relation to one another. Changes in one genre have consequences for all the other genres.

Finally, an example of a genre, its evolution and its impact on other genres can be understood from the work by Sharon Downey “The Evolution of the Rhetorical Genre of Apologia”. The author classifies five sub-genres of apologia which resemble a catalogue of options available to the rhetor.

People may be familiar with the medieval version of the speech genre of apologia from the fantasy television series “Game of Thrones”, season 4, episode 6, entitled “The Laws of Gods and Men” where an innocent man is accused of murder and given the opportunity to defend himself during the trial.

Industry

The author found a great work on debating which is the basis for their web application. Essentially, a competitive conversation of the type debate has the structure of a pyramid.

Analysis

The relevance of the coherence mechanisms is low because those mecanisms are on the micro scale of language, whereas the final implementation needs to afford strategic use. But the principles behind them are that of relying on the common ground of territories of knowledge, using the attention for refereing to objects, using already existing resources to achieve the goals, etc.

Where this author diverges from the classical work of Bakhtin is the classification of genres. Bakhtin considers that greetings and farewells are genres. For this author those are rituals. The function of speech rituals is to create a change: greetings marks the beginning of a conversation event, farewells mark the end of the conversation event.

Besides these well known rituals there are other rituals used during the conversation - primarily for changing, resuming and closing topics. Additionally - rituals for how people adapt to each other and how they evolve together.

Where this author converges with the classical work of Bakhtin is speech will and on the observation that turns are shaped by the choice of genre (see the implementation).

For the purposes of Beseda, the situative genre structure expressed by Günthner and Knoblauch is most relevant. It is concerned with the interaction order - local identities (“presentational figures”), the organisation of turns, the participation framwork.

It is worth noting that genres are the interface between the disciplines of conversation analysis and sociology.

Implementation

Basically, the architect realised that the system can be more contextual by breaking down the central interface into smaller ones with specific use cases.

The basic genres are:

The major difference from the previous version of Besѣda® is that a genre provides the following:

Roadmap

The next epics (collections of tasks) on the roadmap are developing the “dispute”, the “foresight” and the “retrospective” genres.

Version history

Read Next

How to dispute with precision using Besѣda®

Introducing the genre dispute - an overview of the structure, the progression, the resources and some of the basic rules. See the User manual section.

How attention is simulated and how positioning works in Besѣda®

This new feature becomes the main point of interaction with Besѣda®. The feature allows the communicator to select the adjacency position and the relevant utterance by the interlocutor. This is the interface between earlier work on the prgamatic and epistemic actions, reciprocity and emotions.