formal idioms and action

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Formal idioms and action: Toward a grammar of genres

William N. Salmon *

University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

a r t i c l e i n f o

Keywords:GenreFormal idiomConstruction grammarNew rhetoric

a b s t r a c t

Bakhtin tells us that speech genres organize speech similar to the way that grammaticalforms do. This essay takes Bakhtin at his word, and it explores the way this idea worksout in one contemporary theory of grammar. The essay draws an analogy between theway rhetoricians have considered generic form in action-based theories of genre and theformal idiom constructions—i.e. form-meaning-function complexes—of construction gram-mar. It concludes that the constructional analogy provides a clear empirical guide for dis-cussion of generic form that is both shared and unique and stable and unstable, in additionto facts regarding the learning and acquisition of generic form.

� 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

‘‘Speech genres organize our speech in almost the same way as grammatical (syntactical) forms do. Bakhtin (1986: 78–79).

‘‘For usage-based theorists, the fundamental reality of language is people making utterances to one another on particular occa-sions of use. When people repeatedly say ‘similar’ things in ‘similar’ situations, what may emerge over time is a pattern of lan-guage use, schematized in the minds of users as one or another kind of linguistic category or construction – with different kindsof abstractions.” Tomasello (2003: 99).

1. Introduction

For the last two decades, research in rhetorical genre theory has privileged the study of action and social context and sit-uation in favor of the study of language and generic form. This has lead to what Devitt (2009) sees as an unwarranted neglectof the study of form within genre studies. For Devitt, form, meaning, and action are inseparable: to study a genre one muststudy all of these. Thus, Devitt seeks a reintroduction of form. With this reintroduction, however, she cautions against thereintroduction of formalism, which suggests abstract studies of generic form to the exclusion of action and context: bringback the form, she says, but leave off the formalism.

The present essay seeks to meet Devitt halfway on the question of formalism, offering a new kind of formalism that rec-ognizes the need for situation, context, and action within genre studies. It also offers insights on how genres are learned or aacquired, how they evolve over time, their extreme situational variation, and what Devitt calls the ‘‘inter-genre-al” nature aswell. The formalism in question is that of Fillmore et al.’s (1988) construction grammar, and I set the genre of genre studies asanalogous to Fillmore et al.’s formal idioms, which are gestalt like form-meaning-function complexes. I do not claim thatgenres are formal idioms, but I do think – along with the Bakhtinian epigram, above – that genres and grammatical formshave much in common and that much can be learned about one from the study of the other. As such, I illustrate in the rest

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* Address: Department of English, University of British Columbia, #397–1873 East Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z1. Tel.: +1 604 822 6243;fax: +1 604 822 6906.

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of this essay how one particular means of studying idioms can shed much light onto the current state of genre studies andonto the way genres are used both creatively and consistently.

The essay begins with a close look at Devitt’s (2009) case for form without formalism. This reintroduction of form intogenre studies provides a bridge toward introducing a new formalism which can be used to draw generalizations while atthe same time heeding Devitt’s warnings against a certain kind of formalism. Lastly, I show how the constructional formal-ism can be used to make good on Charles Bazerman’s (1994) observations and claims regarding patent grants and applica-tions in terms of Austinian speech acts.

1.1. From form to action and back

For the last 20 years, genre study has turned away from form as an identifying feature of genre. Instead, it has taken afunctional or action-based approach. This shift came about in some ways as a reaction to the formalistic studies of genrewhich came earlier, in which the goal was identification and classification of genre by formal features.

An early seminal paper in this shift toward action was Miller (1984), in which it was argued that genre should be con-sidered not in terms of form alone but rather in terms of ‘‘the action it is used to accomplish” (151). As Devitt (2009: 29)explains, Miller makes a comparison here to the speech act theory of Austin (1962). That is, we must consider the form,but we must also consider what the form is used to perform, and this depends on context or situation.

Devitt (2009) offers a response to the purely action-based studies. She astutely points out that Miller does not deny formor its importance; rather, Miller shifts the focus of inquiry away from it. Two decades after the fact, Devitt suggests now thatform has been neglected long enough and calls for its place to be restored within genre studies—with the explicit cautionthat while we should study form, we should not succumb to formalism. This latter caution is the topic of the current essay,and it is a concern that was present in Bakhtin (1986), when he warned against the mechanical, linguistic analyses of genericform that followed in the path of Saussure and structural linguistics.

Bakhtin (as well as the more recent action-theorists) was concerned that such means of viewing language was artificialand that it missed crucial ingredients of the communicative act. Here is Bakhtin:

When one analyzes an individual sentence apart from its context, the traces of addressivity and the influence of the antic-ipated response, dialogical echoes from others’ preceding utterances, faint traces of changes of speech subjects that havefurrowed the utterance from within—all these are lost, erased, because they are all foreign to the sentence as a unit oflanguage. All these phenomena are connected with the whole of the utterance, and when this whole escapes the fieldof vision of the analyst they cease to exist for him (99–100).

What’s more, we have seen recent arguments that formal linguistic machinery is unable to provide an adequate accountof genre if for no other reason than it is not clear that formal features are distributed consistently across what appear to beinstances of the same type of genres.1 Such formal analyses also of course miss the important facts of recent research that con-siders genres as ‘‘embedded in historical, social, and cultural contexts”.2 The formalist question ‘what are they composed of’thus gives way to the action-based questions of ‘what do they do’ and perhaps more importantly, ‘to whom do they do it’. ThisNew Rhetorical turn to action offered a means of overcoming the shortcomings of a strictly formal approach. It mattered less ifthe form was inconsistent if we could talk about genres in terms of similar actions. Thus, what was a serious problem for for-malism was of less importance to an action-based approach.

Bakhtin would be similarly concerned about many of the branches of linguistics in practice today: particularly thedescendants of the American structuralists in the so-called generative tradition, following Chomsky (1957, 1995), whoare concerned with decontextualized structure and abstract linguistic form and are less interested in the situational, dialogicaspects of communication. However, Bakhtin’s concerns and Devitt’s warnings should not prevent us from considering a for-malism that is more conducive to genre studies. In fact, I argue in this paper that some kind of formalism is ultimately nec-essary in genre studies. The alternative here is for genre theorists to relinquish the ability to make generalizations and tolimit themselves to primarily descriptive work of individual genres. This latter work is clearly important, but alone, it lacksthe power of prediction and it limits our ability to understand how we as humans function in the information-rich world weinhabit. For this latter question, it is necessary to interrogate the interrelation and systematicity of genres, the acquisition orlearning of genres, the evolution and change of genres, the relation of genre to utterances and to lower linguistic units likesentences. To approach these questions, however, requires drawing generalizations across genres. And when we begin to dothis, we have taken the first step toward formalism.

Now, I believe with Bakhtin (and with Devitt) that the structuralist formalisms of yesteryear are ultimately not what isneeded in genre studies; however, this does not entail that all formalism should be abandoned. As I show throughout the restof the paper, construction grammar’s means of bringing together linguistic and contextual facts allows us to address ques-tions of interrelation and situation, acquisition and evolution, while still conceiving of genres as situation-based entities, asMiller (1984) and those following her would have it, and while allowing for a dialogic understanding of language andcommunication.3

1 See, for instance, Medway (2002).2 See Devitt (2009: 28).3 Fillmore et al.’s (1988) treatment of idioms with pragmatic point is a prime example of constructions as dialogic objects. See also Croft and Cruse (2004).

212 W.N. Salmon / Language & Communication 30 (2010) 211–224


In the essay that follows, I look closer at Devitt’s proposal for the study of form without formalism. She proposes fourprinciples for studying form in genre studies, which I then use as a springboard for positing a constructional analogy. Thatis, part of her work is to describe what form in genre is and how it should be considered. I argue that her account of form iscompatible with the more global and formal framework of construction grammar and that the analogy of genre and formalidiom within this grammar is a fruitful one.

2. A return to form

Devitt assembles four basic principles to guide the reintroduction of form into genre studies and to illustrate what sheconsiders the ‘‘fused study of form in genre” (34). According to Devitt, form should be analyzed in genre studies, but without‘‘neglecting addressivity, dialogism, and the whole of the utterance.” The four principles to be discussed below compose thebare framework of her means of discussing form in such a way. I provide a brief introduction to Devitt’s four principles,which is primarily illustrative, but there is some commentary as well in cases where it will prepare us for the positive aspectsof the essay to come in §4.

2.1. The forms of genres are meaningful only within their full contexts – cultural, social, and individual

The point in principle 1 is that form is to be considered fully meaningful only in a full, situational context. Certainly thisclaim is true, if by ‘‘meaningful” is meant something like interpretability, or referentiality, which is something a speaker doeswith language in a specific, actual context.

For Devitt, principle 1 is meant to ensure that generic form is not abstracted away from context and treated in terms offormal linguistic analyses. Or, as she writes: ‘‘Generic forms are never neutral and always belong to somebody” (34). She con-tinues, ‘‘Genre study has more in common with sociolinguistics rather than theoretical linguistics. As in sociolinguistics, theforms in genres take their meaning from who uses them, in what ways, with what motives and expectations” (34). I wouldnote here that this claim is true only on a rather narrow understanding of theoretical linguistics. In fact, Devitt’s descriptionof sociolinguistics sounds very close to the contemporary field of linguistic pragmatics, the insights of which are freely incor-porated into construction grammar formalism.4 So again, while Devitt seems to be arguing against formalism in general, she isreally only arguing against a certain kind of formalism.

2.2. The forms of genres range widely, both synchronically and diachronically, and cannot be pinned down with closed or staticdescriptions

Devitt argues in principle 2 that genres are not stabilized, consistent forms; rather, they vary across individual instances.Rather than being stabilized, they are constantly destabilized. Any static description of generic form, she writes, is ‘‘doomedto incompleteness and to contradiction from actual instances” (39). She illustrates this claim by citing the wide range of indi-vidual variation among blogs, citing Miller and Shepherd (2004) and Herring et al. (2004) as well as the variation and fuzzygenres such as the architect’s sketchbook described in Medway (2002). She rightly points out that there seems to be no stan-dard set of forms or features entailed across instances of these genres. Each individual instance is uniquely and contextuallyconfigured, and this is part of the reason Devitt maintains that there is no stable, abstract exemplification of a particulargenre. All contexts are unique; therefore, each fused form within a context must also be unique.

This does seem to beg the question, however, of how we are to recognize or identify instances of genres if there are nostable means of categorizing them in the first place. It is understandable that each individual instance of a genre is and mustbe unique, but this does not mean that generalizations cannot be drawn. Devitt ultimately calls for a genre’s forms to com-pose an open class of features (as opposed to a closed or fixed class) which are to be described in context. A scholar’s workthen is to address the manner in which ‘‘individuals adapt forms to their own situations, how the genre’s forms vary in dif-ferent social settings, and how the genre has changed over time and continues to change in response to cultural changes”(41). But in order for us to recognize the fused form in its different contexts, there must be some aspect of it that is stable,or somehow recognizable. I think an analogy with the directly referring, temporal adverb now is apt here. The indexical nowhas a unique referent on each use, but it has a stable, conventional means of determining its unique referents: i.e. it fuseswith—or is indexed to—situational context to determine a referent. We can observe this stable aspect of the adverb acrossuses, even as the referent varies on each occasion. Thus, we can talk about now as it occurs in different utterances, with thesemantic features being shared and the referent being unique on each occasion. This brings us to Devitt’s third principle,which considers shared generic forms.

2.3. The forms of genres vary with each unique instance of the genre, but unique instances share common generic forms

With this principle, Devitt seems to anticipate something like the proposal I am making. It is best illustrated with a quotefrom the article: ‘‘The notion of genre itself exists across particular utterances, in human brains, as one type of categorization

4 See Fried and Östman (2005) for an illustration and a history of this relationship.

W.N. Salmon / Language & Communication 30 (2010) 211–224 213


that humans make. These experiential and cognitive facets of genre contribute to genres being not only unique but also shared”(42, emphasis is mine). Thus, genres do share forms, by definition. However, Devitt’s point seems to be that it is impossible topredict exactly which forms are shared.

I believe it is this aspect of Devitt’s framework which is most obviously open to a construction grammar account, for thisis precisely what construction grammar describes of formal idioms: they are unique to their instance, but they share anunderlying form or radical, which never surfaces, and which could never surface in an actual utterance. As I will illustratein more detail below, formal idioms—constructions—bear a relationship between ‘shared’ and ‘unique’ that is very closeto the one Devitt predicates of forms of genres.

The uniqueness Devitt describes is ultimately a result of the ‘‘fusion” process that occurs between form and substance.That is, the shared generic form fuses with content and context, resulting in generic form that is unique but which seemsto be underdetermined by an aspect of form shared across genres.

2.4. The forms of genres are intertextual, interacting with forms of other genres

The principle point here is a comment on what Devitt describes as the ‘‘inter-genre-al” nature of genres. Essentially, gen-res depend on other genres with which they interact in a kind of intertextuality. This has been pointed out often in the lit-erature over the years,5 and Devitt utilizes it as a means of accounting for generic variety and overlap in which the overlap inaction of various genres can be seen as an influence on the overlapping of forms. As Devitt writes, ‘‘full study of generic formswould include studying the forms of other, related genres to see how the forms take their meaning in part from the forms ofother genres” (44).

In the following section, I provide a short introduction to the key principles of construction grammar as they are relevantto the current paper. I then proceed to show how it is compatible with the idea of form and genre as seen by Devitt and howan analogy between genre and constructions can provide a useful way of conceptualizing the former: especially in light ofwhat at first blush seem to be contradictions in the notion of genre. The greater tangibility of constructions offers a morevisible means of probing apparently contradictory claims that genres are both flexible and stable, that they are sharedand unique, etc. The notion of constructional inheritance will also prove useful in my discussion of Bazerman’s (1994) castingof patent applications and grants as speech acts. As Bazerman’s analysis stands now, it is subject to all of the same criticismsthat have been leveled at speech act theory by linguists and philosophers for the last several decades. When his observationsare recast in terms of construction grammar, however, his original observations and the intuitions behind them can be seento be on a much more solid theoretical footing.

3. Introduction to construction grammar

Construction grammar, which grew out of work by Charles Fillmore, Paul Kay, and their colleagues at Berkeley in the1980s, began as a response to the notion of generative grammar associated with Chomsky (1957, 1995) and work stemmingfrom that tradition. As Goldberg (2006a: 3) points out, however, the study of constructions—form-meaning-function com-plexes—have been ‘‘the basis of major advances in the study of grammar since the days of the ancient Stoics”. Thus, construc-tion grammar is not a radical new way of doing linguistics but is instead a return to a rich tradition dating back to antiquity.It is also a theory of grammar that is unlike the linguistics that has come to be associated with abstract formalism—i.e. gen-erative grammar and other descendents of the American structuralists—in that it incorporates broad generalizations aboutdiscourse and pragmatic situation into its grammatical framework, and it sees ‘‘function and form as inseparable from eachother” (F&Ö: 2004: 12). In this section I provide a brief introduction to the framework of construction grammar as it is rel-evant to formal idioms and the analogy to genres I present in this paper.6

Construction grammar begins with the observation that a decontextualized, compositional analysis of a sentence or con-struction is seldom successful in providing an accurate picture of that construction. Many or most linguistic constructionsare loaded with idiomatic meaning and usage restrictions and other information that cannot be computed as a sum ofthe units composing the construction. That is, the whole is more than just the sum of the parts.7 The construction as a wholemust be seen as having this information associated with it conventionally. This extends from determining the kind of lexicalitems which are licensed or allowed to appear in a particular construction, to determining pragmatic discourse conditions inwhich constructions themselves are allowed to appear. For instance, a ditransitive construction, as in (1), requires that the goalargument in the construction be animate, as in (1a).8

5 For example, see Devitt (1991), Bazerman (1994), and Giltrow (2002).6 For much more detail and an intellectual history of construction grammar see Croft and Cruse (2004), Fried and Östman (2004) and Goldberg (1995, 2006a).

Fillmore et al. (1988) is one of the early, seminal papers in construction grammar, and it lays out a landscape of the many different kinds of grammaticalconstructions, including ‘‘formal idioms”, which are the primary construction type of interest in the present essay.

7 This seems to be in accord with Devitt’s notion of the form of genres being an open class. It is the whole that has meaning, not just the sum of a set of formalparts.

8 Example (1) is adapted from Goldberg (2006b: 9).



(1)a. Liza sent Stan a book.b. ??Liza sent storage a book.

When an inanimate goal argument is substituted, as in (1b), the construction becomes less acceptable. So constructionalinformation determines the kinds of lexical items that can appear in the construction.

Similarly, constructions can be restricted to appearing in certain kinds of discourse contexts. For instance, those construc-tions which are said to have ‘‘pragmatic point” are only allowed to appear in very specialized constructs. Consider (2a and b).9

(2)a. Him be a doctor!?b. Good morning.

The first example must be uttered as a response to a dubious assertion or presupposition, and the incredulous intonationis included as part of the constructional formula. The second example must be uttered in the opening of a conversation orgreeting. Further, (2b) generally presupposes a response from the person to whom it is addressed, in what is referred to inconversational analyses as an adjacency pair.10 This discourse-level information cannot be accounted for in a standard compo-sitional or formal linguistic treatment of the collocation. It can be given an account, though, if (2b) is considered in terms of aconstruction: i.e. a form and meaning pairing.

The following paragraph from Fried and Östman (2005: 1754) sums up quite succinctly the key concerns of theframework:

CxG sees itself as a grammar of language as a whole—both of its ‘core’ structures (what traditional grammars, includingmost generative grammars, have aimed for) and of its so-called ‘periphery’ (including what traditional grammars call sen-tence fragments, idioms, and various non-clausal phrases). Second, constructional analyses must be consistent with whatwe know about cognition and interaction; it is this requirement that gives CxG its basis for having a universal impact. Andthird, different traditional ‘levels’ of grammatical description (phonology, syntax, semantics, prosody, pragmatics, dis-course, etc.) are integrated in a single complex sign—a grammatical construction—which represents a generalization aboutspeakers’ grammatical knowledge. Put differently, linguistic structure—on all ‘levels’—is not seen as the result of rulesthat apply to predefined units and categories; instead, the basic unit of analysis and representation in CxG is a conven-tional pattern of usage in which form and meaning/function are associated in particular ways.

A construction, then, can be considered a bundle of information which limits the potential surface forms of the constructionas well as a range of other information, potentially including pragmatic and usage information, semantic and morphologicalinformation, prosodic information, functional restrictions, and so on, and it can range in size and complexity from that of anindividual word to a complex syntactic frame.11 Importantly, the grammar is not simply a collection or list of such constructions.The constructions are organized into networks based on relationships of shared or common information, and based on inheri-tance relations in which a construction ‘‘inherits” information from other constructions that dominate it. As Fried and Östman(2004:71) describe the relation, ‘‘if construction A inherits construction B, it means that A contains all the specifications that holdfor B, in addition to features idiosyncratic to A”. In this way, an account can be given for the overlap of form and meaning acrossconstructions, and this is the crucial mechanism in construction grammar for accounting for these relational observations.

What we have then, ultimately, is a monostratal framework consisting of an inventory of form-meaning pairs, in whichoverlap across constructions are explained by intricate networks of inheritance and shared relations. We will see below thatthis arrangement of inheritance and shared relations is also a compelling means of describing shared generic informationand that learning/acquisition facts about genres fall out naturally as a result.

In the next section, I consider again Devitt’s four principles of generic form, but this time in terms of construction grammar.

4. Devitt’s four principles and construction grammar

4.1. The forms of genres are meaningful only within their full contexts – cultural, social, and individual

There are two kinds of forms we can talk about with constructions. The first of these would be those parts of the construc-tion that are shared across instances of a given construction. For example, in a formal idiom such as in (3a), there is a reducedor abstract level of form that is shared across all instances of the idiom. This level of form gives the construction its basicshape, but it does not itself surface in the idiom. As we can see below in (3b–f), it surfaces as a kind of interpreted form,

9 See Fillmore et al. (1988) for discussion of constructions with pragmatic point.10 Other examples of adjacency pairs are invitation-acceptance/refusal and apology-acceptance/rejection. See Schegloff and Sacks (1973) for more

discussion.We will see below that these adjacency pairs/pragmatic point constructions also provide a useful analogy for us in discussion of Bazerman’sapplication-grant pairing. Just as the application and grant are ordered, dependent components of a single act or process, so are the components of theadjacency pair.

11 Bakhtin (1986: 61) describes a similarly wide range of speech genres: ‘‘For here, on level of inquiry, appear such heterogeneous phenomena as the single-word everyday rejoinder and the multivolume novel, the military command that is standardized even in its intonation and the profoundly lyrical work, and soon.”



and it is these interpreted forms which are then meaningful in Devitt’s sense: i.e. as entities situated in full cultural, social,and individual contexts.

(3)a. [The X-er, the Y-er]b. The taller you are, the better your clothes fit.c. The more money you earn, the higher taxes you pay.d. The better you swim, the more fun you will have.e. The darker your shirt color is, the lighter your pants can be.f. The better a child can skip rope, the better his reading skills will be.

The idioms given in (3) are what Fillmore et al. (1988) refer to as ‘‘formal idioms”, or lexically open idioms. Fillmore et al.describe these kinds of idioms as ‘‘syntactic patterns dedicated to semantic and pragmatic purposes not knowable from theirform alone” (505). As can be seen in (b)–(f), the syntactic frame, which remains consistent across instances, can be host toinfinitely many combinations of lexical items. Importantly, the abstract, syntactic level of form in (3a) is not meaningful inany cultural, social, or individual way; rather, we can compare it to the illustration of shared form that Devitt posits for genres,as a deeper ‘‘cognitive facet of genre” (42). However, if we assume the examples in (3b–f) are actual individual instances of theformal idiom with contexts and so on, then the form in those examples would be meaningful in the way Devitt requires forgenres; that is we could examine the forms of those tokens in their contexts and discover their functions and pragmatic ac-tions and then attempt generalizations across tokens. Devitt in fact calls for just this direction of observation with genres,writing that it is necessary to study individual, contextualized instances of a genre, for: ‘‘Without a contextualized discussion,these formal facts remain descriptive facts that could have multiple significances” (36). So Devitt alludes to the need of somekind of formalism, but not one that comes at the expense of a contexualized observation of individual instances.

In effect, what we see with both constructions and genres is that the observation of contextual instances reinforces ourconstruction of the abstract. In turn, the abstract informs our ability to recognize situations and relations in which it is appro-priate to use an instance of the construction, thus providing the basis for what is shared across instances.12

My suggestion in this paper is that the lexically open, formal idioms like those in (3) are comparable to the way thatDevitt conceives of generic form, with its shared and unique components, and its meaningfulness only in full contexts. Assuch, they provide a clear model with which to observe generic form. The latter is fleeting and unstable, infinitely malleable,and constantly changing; however, these same observations could be made of linguistic and constructional form as well. It isjust that with linguistic form, the instability and constant change occurs at a much slower pace, and as such, we are offeredan apparently more objective vantage point from which to view it.

4.2. The forms of genres range widely, both synchronically and diachronically, and cannot be pinned down with closed or staticdescriptions

The analogy I am pursuing between genres and formal idioms can be drawn quite easily with this principle. I will startwith synchronic variation. For this it is only necessary to consider the manner in which individual tokens of a sentence typecan vary. They can take infinitely many different shapes: we can multiply instances of the examples above in (3b–f) indef-initely.13 The same is obviously true of generic instances. According to Bazerman (1994: 82), ‘‘over a period of time individualsperceive homologies in circumstances that encourage them to see these occasions for similar kinds of utterances” (82). In otherwords, a genre develops over time relative to certain situations. It is only a small step forward then to see that both genres andformal idioms, though at least partly conventionalized, must be always in the process of conventionaliz-ing. That is, they areconstantly changing or evolving. From a synchronic perspective, this change is invisible; however, if genres and formal idiomsare observed over a period of time it is then straightforward to witness. There is a wide literature on the diachronic change ofidiomatic expressions. For instance, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) discuss the diachronic conventionalization process of metaphorto idiom. The same is true of genres. Giltrow (1992) discusses the evolution of a technical manual which converted itself overtime from a procedural manual to a reference manual. A similar evolution is reported in Giltrow (1994), which discusses thegradual change in conventions of reports of sentencing found in Canadian newspapers from 1950 to 1990. Likewise, Bazerman(1988) traces the evolution of the experimental research article over time. Genres are things that grow with a culture and ourinterpretation of it. As a culture is constantly in flux, so are generic objects. The same is obviously true of the semantic and struc-tural change that is constantly—albeit more slowly—at work in language.

4.3. The forms of genres vary with each unique instance of the genre, but unique instances share common generic forms

Devitt focuses to a large extent in her essay on the variability, uniqueness, and instability of generic form. So much so, infact, that it is easy to overlook the fact that genres by definition must share some features. We see Devitt’s acknowledgmentof this in the follow lines:

12 See Devitt (2004: 21) on reciprocity of genre and situation.13 There is also much idiomatic variation across dialects of a language and speech communities.



The existence of genres in everyday parlance—like the recognition of blogs, for example—affirms the existence of sharedforms since genres require form to fuse with substance to create the generic actions that are recognized in the word ‘blog’.Even though the blogs studied, for example, resisted formal consistency, groups of them developed enough similarities forscholars to propose possible sub-genres (k-logs, for example, of filter versus personal blogs) (43).

I noted above that this principle provides the most compelling motivation for drawing the analogy between genres andformal idioms. Devitt tells us that it is necessary to account for shared form while at the same time allowing for individuality.This is precisely what construction grammar allows in formal idioms, in which there is an abstract frame or form (such as(3a), above) which is interpreted with respect to context and intention, resulting in unique, individual instances of the con-struction. The jazz composition metaphor that Devitt provides is apt here as well: ‘‘Jazz performers operate from someshared purposes, strategies, and forms, but each performance employs those shared elements and brings in others to createa unique composition” (43). The mental object of the composition cannot surface in a state that is uninterpreted. If it is inplay in the world, then it has come to be so through someone’s interpretation or rendition of it. As with the genre or theformal idiom, we don’t have direct access to any abstract form or mental object: even though it is through this that wecan talk about ‘‘shared” form in the first place. The constructional frame of the formal idiom exists as a mental object in whatis called ‘‘the lexicon”, but we do not have direct access to it, and we can only experience it when it is put into play within acontext. The same would seem to be true of genres.

4.4. The forms of genres are inter-genre-al, interacting with forms of other genres

In Devitt’s last point, she argues that genres are intertextual, or inter-genre-al. That is, genres interact with other genresand so ‘‘genres take up forms from the genres with which they interact” (44). This undoubtedly contributes to the instabilityof form and function that Devitt and many others have noted, as well as to generic innovation and evolution. Devitt (2009)offers the example of blogs interacting with other genres and the resulting form and action:

Of course, blogs form a set of genres for computer-mediated communication, along with text messaging and e-mailing,for example. The forms of each genre within that set vary as the types of actions vary. Experiences and contrasts with bothe-mail and IM, for example, likely help shape the length, tone, and organizational structures of blogs. Blogs interact inter-genre-ally with other websites as well, linking to and commenting on personal home pages, news sites, and non-profitorganizations’ websites, for example. The nature and shape of those links derive in part from the nature and shape ofthose other web genres [. . .]. Full study of generic forms would include studying the forms of other, related genres to seehow the forms take their meaning in part from the forms of the other genres (44, emphasis is mine).

Generalizing, we can say something to the effect that as blogs interact with the various other genres, they take on some ofthe properties of those other genres while still retaining their own bloggal properties. The same is true with language in gen-eral: linguistic forms constantly interact with others and are in a constant state of change or conventionalization, albeit at amuch slower rate than that of its generic counterparts. Construction grammar offers a way to create a synchronic snapshot ofthe inter-constructional relations in terms of constructional inheritance. Recall the quote I gave above from Fried andÖstman (2004: 71) to describe the inheritance mechanism of construction grammar: ‘‘if construction A inherits constructionB, it means that A contains all the specifications that hold for B, in addition to features idiosyncratic to A”. In this way,construction grammar can account for constructional overlap and variation.

One clear-cut example of the manner in which this process works can be seen in Michaelis and Lambrecht (1995). Thegoal in this work is to provide a constructional account of exclamative constructions in English. As they note, the class ofexclamative sentence types is quite heterogeneous in form, yet the constructions can be shown to overlap substantially. Hereis a list of their exclamative sentence types (M&L, 1995: ex. 2):

(4)a. It’s amazing how much you can get in the TRUNK.b. It’s amazing the DIFFERENCE!c. You wouldn’t believe the BICKERING that goes on.d. GOD my feet hurt.e. What a DAY I had.f. The things I DO for that boy!g. Are YOU in for it!h. I’m amazed at how much TIME it took.i. It’s so HOT in here!

As they note, it is a misnomer indeed to speak of ‘‘a unitary exclamative sentence type in English” (376). Rather, as is illus-trated in (4), above, exclamative sentence types take many different forms, thus rendering it quite difficult to arrange a tra-ditional, formal account of the exclamative sentence type. M&L argue, however, that ‘‘each of these exclamative sub-typesinherits its semantic and pragmatic properties from an abstract superconstruction: the ‘‘Abstract Exclamative Construction”(AEC)” (376). In this way, M&L propose to account for the shared core of semantic and pragmatic properties that can be seen



in the individual constructions, while allowing for the constructions to be individually unique. The formal and functionalproperties of the AEC, which are shared by the constructions in (4), are given below in (5).

(5) Semantico-pragmatic properties of the abstract exclamative constructiona. Presupposed open propositionb. Scalar extentc. Assertion of affective stance: expectation contraventiond. Identifiability of described referente. Deixis

I will illustrate each of these properties in brief for (4a), which is repeated for convenience:

(4) a. It’s amazing how much you can get in the TRUNK.

The property in (5a) requires that an open proposition be presupposed in the use of the construction. This open propositionwould be something like You can get X amount into the trunk. So uttering (4a) presupposes that a certain amount of objects can fitinto the trunk. The quantity term much is, as M&L note, a scalar term, and it places the amount of objects that can be fit into thetrunk on a scale from less to more, as is required in (5b). For (5c), we see that the entire utterance expresses ‘‘the speaker’s judg-ment that the proposition is surprising” (379): i.e. that more can be fit into the trunk than might have otherwise been expected.

The next property, (5d), requires referential identifiability. That is, in exclamative constructions, it is generally requiredthat ‘‘the entity of whom the scalar property is predicated [is] identifiable”, where identifiable means that both speaker andhearer have a referent in mind for the entity in question at speech time.14 The last quality M&L assign to the AEC is deicticanchoring, as in (5e). This can be described simply as the fact that exclamative constructions generally involve personal and tem-poral deixis. By default, the personal judgment being expressed in the exclamative belongs to the speaker. Similarly, the affec-tation being expressed must hold at speech time. It is quite straightforward to find each of these shared properties in theconstructions in (4a–i), and M&L argue that this is due to each of the properties inheriting the AEC. And along with the sharedproperties of form and function, each of the constructions has its own unique properties as well, as is consistent with the notionof inheritance summarized above from Fried and Östman (2004: 71).

Thus, we could approach Devitt’s description of generic interaction in terms of inheritance: for example, in terms of abloggal form inheriting that of a text message or e-mailing form. The blog then would possess the properties of the text mes-sage or e-mail in addition to its own unique properties. This kind of inheritance would be established in terms of whatMichaelis and Lambrecht (1996: 217) refer to as a ‘‘subsumption link”. In terms of constructions, this method of inheritanceis used to describe the relation of a construction of one type appearing within the construction of another type: i.e. where thefirst construction is subsumed by the second. The analogy to the example above with blogs and e-mail is clear. Another clearexample might be genres of literature reviews as they appear in the larger contexts of scientific or literary articles, etc. Again,we would have a genre within a genre, in which the properties of one are subsumed by the other.

The second notion of inheritance commonly described in construction grammar is that of an ‘‘instance link”. This notion of inher-itance is employed to discuss situations in which one construction is a more specialized instance of another, or in M&L’s (1996: 217)terms, when one construction is a ‘‘more fully specified instance” of another. For genres, this notion of a more fully specified instancecan be illustrated with examples of letters, as described in Bhatia (1993, 2004).15 Bhatia considers sales promotion letters and jobapplication letters to be sub-genres of a supergenre which he calls ‘‘promotional genre”, which is itself an abstract representation. Bothsub-genres share properties that they inherit from the supergenre, but they are ultimately unique entities. So we see the job applicationletter as a more fully specified instance of Bhatia’s promotional genre. The letter shares properties with the promotional genre, but it isstill unique as a specified instance. This is precisely what Bhatia (2004:60) calls for in terms of genres and sub-genres:

All [these types of letters] and a number of other instances of this kind have a large degree of overlap in the communi-cative purposes they tend to serve and that is the main reason why they are seen as forming a closely related discoursecolony, serving more or less a common promotional purpose, in spite of the fact that some of them, more than others, mayalso display subtle differences in their realizations.

Thus, what Bhatia thinks of in terms of a ‘‘discourse colony” would be achieved in a constructional framework throughnotions of inheritance. Similarly, Bhatia’s term is useful as a means of conceptualizing the familial relations evident in theexclamative constructions exemplified above in (4).

4.5. Summary

It seems quite clear that thus far, Devitt’s requirements for generic form are quite compatible with the funda-mental mechanisms of construction grammar. This new approach to linguistic theory offers a useful analogy for

14 For comparison, the referents of definite-marked nouns are generally considered to be identifiable.15 A similar example could also be made of Samraj’s (2004) observations of academic research papers taken from different disciplines. Samraj argues they are

all examples of the same genre, even though they vary with their individual disciplines.



accounting for shared and unique form across instances as well as for what Devitt terms the inter-genre-al prop-erties of genres.

In addition, the extent to which construction grammar utilizes pragmatic and functional information in its formal ac-counts fits quite nicely with the observation that generic form quite often varies across instances, and that genres cannotbe defined by form alone. As we saw above with the exclamative sentences in (4), it is necessary to include functional infor-mation as part of that sentence-type’s distinguishing features. In earlier linguistic theory—i.e. what might be thought of as‘‘pure” formalism—this functional or usage-based information would not have been considered, and so the generalizationthat is drawn across the sentence type in construction grammar would not have been possible. That is, in the pure formalism,the usage-based information would have been invisible, and thus an important part of the motivation for grouping the sen-tences in (4) together would have been missing. The formal account in construction grammar, though, depends on form andusage-based information—just as Devitt calls for in genre studies. Ultimately, the fact that the forms vary across instances—in both grammar and genre—becomes less important when it is accompanied by the functional or action-based content.

5. Learning and acquisition

I want to change pace here and talk about some more general benefits of the construction/genre analogy I have been mak-ing. Along with the means the analogy provides for conceptualizing shared and unique form, interaction between genres, andso on as discussed in §4, construction grammar also provides insight into the learning and acquisition of constructions that Ibelieve are relevant to genre studies. There are two different kinds of useful information to be described in §5. The first isgeneral, and it will be discussed briefly here in §5.0. Two more specific kinds of parallels will be discussed below in§§5.1–2.

There is a very clear parallel to be drawn between general constructional acquisition by children and the manner in whichgenres are learned or acquired. There has been a large amount of empirical work done on constructional acquisition bypsycholinguists and language acquisition specialists. A basic picture of the way children acquire constructions is comparableto the description given in the epigraph by Michael Tomasello on the first page of this article. It is worth repeating here:

For usage-based theorists, the fundamental reality of language is people making utterances to one another on particularoccasions of use. When people repeatedly say ‘similar’ things in ‘similar’ situations, what may emerge over time is a pat-tern of language use, schematized in the minds of users as one or another kind of linguistic category or construction –with different kinds of abstractions. (2003: 99).

That is, children begin to learn constructional information by mapping usages to situations and then generalizing overthem. This description of constructional acquisition is quite reminiscent of the way generic learning has been described.For instance, here is Bazerman (1994: 82) discussing genre: ‘‘over a period of time individuals perceive homologies in cir-cumstances that encourage them to see these occasions for similar kinds of utterances”.

Constructional acquisition thus seems to present a clear model for discussing generic acquisition. One benefit of the anal-ogy is that constructional learning is empirically testable in a quite straightforward fashion. And, much progress has beenmade in this area by linguists and psychologists over the last twenty years.16 Generic acquisition, on the other hand, is notobviously empirically testable. Yet, the intuition about the mechanism of generic learning is very close to that of constructionallearning, and I believe this aspect of construction grammar and the empirical work that has been done in it offers a clear empir-ical guide for discussion of generic learning .

Beyond this similarity—i.e. the generalizing across instances—there are two more specific parallels between construc-tional and generic learning, which I will discuss in §§5.1–2. These are priming and bootstrapping.

5.1. Generic and constructional priming

The notion of intertextuality, or inter-genre-ality, is extremely useful in observing the wide range of variation and genericinteraction in actual instances. But this interconnectivity can also be seen to be informative at an even more foundationallevel. This is in the learning or acquisition of generic information.

In descriptive work of genres, it is often useful to abstract away from this interconnectedness and thus talk about a singlegenre as if it exists on its own as an autonomous object. This is of course not the reality, and it would greatly reduce theutility of genres if it were. Genres, as typified responses to situations, are shortcuts for interacting with the world; yet, thereare so many different kinds of genres and frames that it is unattractive to suggest that they must be learned individually. Onthe other hand, if we can say that a person’s facility with one genre allows her to predict and adapt by analogy to new genresmore quickly than learning the whole thing from scratch, then we have made a useful and significant claim. For instance,consider again Bhatia’s ‘‘promotional genre” that I discussed above in §4.4. It makes sense to say that if a person has acquiredfluency with one of the promotional sub-genres, then that person would be more inclined to gain fluency with a second sub-genre, which might differ in various ways but which still shares important qualities. In this way, genres promote the learningof related genres. There is an analogous line of reasoning with constructions in construction grammar.

16 See Tomasello (2003) and Goldberg (2006a) for an overview of the literature.



Goldberg (2006a: 120-25) shows that sub-types of the Caused-Motion Construction can ‘‘prime” or prepare a learner for usingand learning other sub-types of the same construction. As she writes, ‘‘the same or similar patterns are easier to learn or repro-duce” (121). Further, Goldberg illustrates that it is both the form and the meaning of a construction that are important in primingother, similar constructions. As with the more general discussion of constructional and generic learning given above in §5.0, con-structional priming effects can be subjected directly to empirical testing, and the effects can also be seen directly in transcripts ofnatural language. On the other hand, with genres these effects are intuitive—as with my use of Bhatia’s (2004) data above—butthey are more difficult to test for. And as I suggested above, I am not arguing that the generic facts should be assimilated to con-structional facts; but rather, I am arguing that the constructional facts might guide our thinking about the generic facts.

5.2. Generic and constructional bootstrapping

The second kind of parallel I want to draw involves what has been referred to as constructional bootstrapping. Goldberg(1995, 2006b) has shown how children, having acquired the basic syntactic frame of certain constructions, can then inferthe meaning of verbs that are unfamiliar to them based on their location in the construction. The reason for this is thatthe constructions as a whole have meaning. Goldberg illustrates this claim with the ditransitive construction, which she ar-gues is conventionally associated with transferring objects from one entity to another, or giving. Thus, when childrenencounter an unfamiliar verb in the construction, they assume that its meaning has something to do with transfer or giving.For instance, consider the ditransitive (6), which contains the nonsensical verb moop.17

(6) She mooped him something.

According to Goldberg, when children are asked what this verb means, they ‘‘disproportionately respond that the novelverb means ‘give’” (2006b). Further, we can see that when actual verbs that do not normally encode notions of transfer orgiving are embedded in a ditransitive construction, they take on this kind of meaning as well, as in (7) [Goldberg’s (2a)].

(7) Pat baked Chris a cake.

The verb ‘‘bake” does not normally encode notions of transfer or giving; yet, in (7) the conventional meaning of the con-struction at large seems to coerce this meaning upon the verb. The idea is that learners infer the meaning of the verb con-stituent from its place in the larger syntactic construction; or, they pull themselves up by their constructional bootstraps.

What about generic bootstrapping? Again, there seems to be a straightforward analogy. Familiarity with a genre—say, ascientific research report—entails knowledge of the sub-genres that appear within it. Readers of scientific reports expect thosereports to contain certain sections and to deal with various kinds of information in certain ways. Thus, if the methods or lit-erature review section of a report were to be configured in a way which was novel to the reader, the reader’s knowledge of thelarger report genre would allow her the ability to infer information about those newly configured sections based on herknowledge of the larger report. This would be a kind of generic bootstrapping similar to the constructional variant discussedabove, in which knowledge of an embedded constituent is entailed by or deducible from knowledge of the super-constituent.

In the final section, I will consider an analysis of the patent application and grant genres as arranged in Bazerman (1994).

6. Constructions and patent applications

Bazerman (1994) attempts to illuminate the genres of US patent applications and grants by considering them in terms ofAustin’s (1962) category of explicit performatives, or speech acts. However, in his assimilation of the two concepts, Bazermanis required to take a very rigid and untenable reading of Austin’s speech acts and is subject to the same criticisms that have beendirected at Austin by linguists and philosophers for the last three decades. I suggest ultimately that the work Bazerman pred-icates of the genres in question might be better considered within the mechanisms of construction grammar along the lines ofthe analogy I have been arguing for in this paper. This allows an account of the generic properties with which Bazerman is con-cerned, and it does so without having to take the overly strong interpretation of speech act theory that Bazerman takes.

6.1. Defining genres

Bazerman (1994) defines the kind of genre he has in mind as a text that has become typified through repeated usage insituations which are perceived as somehow similar to those which have preceded it.18 According to Bazerman, ‘‘over a periodof time individuals perceive homologies in circumstances that encourage them to see these occasions for similar kinds ofutterances” (82). In other words, it is a text (or utterance) that has developed usage conventions relative to certain situations,due to expectations of behavior in those situations.

17 This is example (1) in Goldberg (2006b).18 See also Miller (1984) and Swales (1990) for comparable arrangements of genre.



6.2. US patent applications and grants

Bazerman (1994) is concerned primarily with US patent applications and the issuing grants for those applications as theyappear in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Essentially, he describes a rigid application form, the content, organiza-tion, and phrasing of which is partly specified by US patent law. Upon completion and submission of the application, it isthen appraised by a patent examiner, who either approves or denies it based on criteria determined by law.

The crucial points for Bazerman are the legal regulations of the conventions of patent text and the recognition that thepatent is a legal, accepted means of performing an act. We recognize the genre of the patent application, and we understandthe force of it and ‘‘its place within structured human activities” (82). Without this recognition, the patent procedure wouldbear no significance or have any kind of social value. Thus, Bazerman sets up the legal regulation as a kind of Austinian felic-ity condition for making the application and grant.

6.3. Patent applications and grants as speech acts

Bazerman (1994:84) considers the US patent application and patent grant to be ‘‘classic speech acts” of the kind consid-ered by Austin and Searle:

The two related and evolving genres that we have been considering (the patent application and the patent grant, or letterspatent) may be seen as classic speech acts as described by Austin and Searle. These documents have recognized a stableillocutionary force within the legal system as directives (requesting or applying is an attempt to direct another’s behav-iour) and declarations (announcing or declaring a thing is so, makes it so [. . .].

That is, Bazerman considers the patent genres as comparable to explicit, performative acts: the patent application is com-pared to Searle’s (1969) directive act, the paradigm cases of which are requesting and questioning; the patent grant itself iscompared to the prototypical act of declaration, the paradigm cases of which are declaring war, christening, firing fromemployment, and so on.

Following Austin (1962) and Searle (1969), Bazerman claims that illocutionary force is conventionally associated withform. Thus, for Austin and Searle, illocutionary force is built into—or is a conventional part of—the form of the sentence;for Bazerman, the illocutionary force is built into the form of the genre. There are important questions to be addressed herefor Bazerman, as over the years it has been far from agreed upon that Austin’s and Searle’s claims of conventional associationof illocutionary force is warranted. For example, there is the problem of indirect speech acts, which arguably convey thesame illocutionary force as the paradigm cases, but which can vary widely in form. Further, the vast majority of speech actsoccurring in natural language are of this indirect kind merely because speakers in complex social relationships prefer tospeak indirectly in order to lower the risk of social missteps.19 The frequency of indirect speech acts and the implausibilityof assigning conventional illocutionary force to a diverse range of sentence forms raises serious problems for the claim that illo-cutionary force should be considered a conventional part of sentence meaning.

Bazerman does not address these concerns directly, but he does seem to be sensitive to them, as he withdraws his patentgenres from the larger class of speech acts of ordinary language to one that he considers to be more stable. The patent genre,he argues, is highly institutionalized and governed rigidly by the rule of law.20 Thus, as an instance of a speech act, its inter-pretative boundaries are more tightly confined (1994:88):

Our task is simplified and stabilized when we look to behaviours in highly regularized or institutional settings that helpenforce recognizable and socially agreed upon characters to particular moments. Since the institutions and social under-standings set the stage and define the game, it is much easier to see what is going on, and we can make plausible con-nections among various moments or acts if participants see and treat those moments or acts as similar. We should not,however, confuse a reasonably stable set of linguistic practices evolved within a particular strand of socio-historical cir-cumstances with an absolute understanding of speech acts.

In effect what Bazerman attempts to do here is align the patent genres with the most rigidly constrained of Austin’s andSearle’s speech acts, such as christening and marrying, which are a minor subset of speech acts, to the exclusion of the vastmajority of speech acts that occur in ordinary language.

This reduction seems justified, as the patent application and grant are certainly specialized acts occurring in a specialized,institutional ritual. Yet, even this reduction away from the ordinary indirect speech acts of everyday language is not enoughto maintain the distance Bazerman would need from the criticism raised by indirect speech acts. For even in these ceremo-nial performatives it is not clear that the illocutionary force is part of conventional meaning or tied to the form itself. Theresult of this for Bazerman is that he must posit a unique class of speech acts, and he must claim by brute stipulation thatthe illocutionary force associated with these speech acts is a conventional part of their form; yet, his account is necessarilyplagued by the same difficulties which have plagued speech act theory for many years.

19 See Levinson (1983) and Brown and Levinson (1987) on politeness. See Sadock (2004) on the high frequency of indirect speech acts.20 This assumes that the rule of law is static and closed to negotiation and interpretation, which is a dubious assumption at best.



6.4. Constructional inheritance and conventional force

Austin and Searle originally proposed that illocutionary force was conventionally associated with individual forms, inwhat Levinson (1983) refers to as the ‘‘Literal Force Hypothesis”; however, it soon became clear that there were many dif-ferent ways of performing the same act. For instance, I can apologize directly, indirectly, by implicature, etc., with the apol-ogy taking different forms in each instance. Thus, the illocutionary force of apology would have to be associatedconventionally with many different kinds of forms. Similarly, I can use the same form to perform many different illocution-ary acts. This has been seen by many linguists and philosophers as a serious problem for speech act theory, and is summa-rized clearly in Levinson (1983) and more recently in Sadock (2004).21

Construction grammar proposes a compelling solution to the problem of the Literal Force Hypothesis, though. Recall thediscussion of Michaelis and Lambrecht (1995) above, in which the abstract AEC construction was inherited by the many dif-ferent exclamative constructions illustrated in (4). M&L suggest that with these examples, in which the inheritance of theAEC can be independently motivated on structural and functional grounds, that something like the Literal Force Hypothesiscan be maintained. A wide variety of forms can inherit the same abstract construction, which then allows for the inheritingconstructions to share certain properties of form or function while being unique in others. I think something like this can bemade to work in discussion of genre as well. That is, if instances of a various genre are seen to share function or actions whilediffering in some or many formal properties, it should be possible to account for this sharing and uniqueness in terms ofsomething like inheritance.

In essence, construction grammar provides a partial solution to the Literal Force Hypothesis for some cases. Michaelis andLambrecht (1995) claim as much for exclamatives. The problem for Bazerman is that his observations are cast in terms ofAustin’s traditional speech act theory and the Literal Force Hypothesis, for which there are serious problems as I’ve men-tioned above. Under a constructional account, though, the criticism against Bazerman is far less damaging.

In the following section, I will mention one final benefit of a constructional account for the patent application and grant.

6.5. Patent applications and grants: genres with pragmatic point?

One of the more interesting aspects of Bazerman’s (1994) account of applications and grants is his description of ‘‘sys-tems” of genres. The patent application and the grant are issued by separate individuals, but they come together to createa unified act, with the grant depending on the submission of the application. That is, the application genre creates a situationwhich can be inhabited by the grant genre. With this observation, Bazerman shows that genres depend on each other fortimeliness and that this way of thinking about genres gives ‘‘a precision to the notion of rhetorical situation” and ‘‘a newprecision to the concept of kairos”. Here is a description in Bazerman’s words:

I would like to introduce the notion of systems of genre. These are interrelated genres that interact with each other in spe-cific settings. Only a limited range of genres may appropriately follow upon another in particular settings, because thesuccess conditions of the actions of each require various states of affairs to exist. That is, a patent may not be issued unlessthere is an application. An infringement complaint cannot be filed unless there is a valid patent (98).

What Bazerman describes then is comparable to the manner in which utterances are linked to situations and to the dia-logic nature of utterances being dependant upon the utterances that have come prior.

Construction grammar accounts for similar concerns. While Bakhtin considers every utterance as dialogic and as a re-sponse to another utterance, there are certain kinds of constructions which are more directly comparable to the rigid rela-tionship described by Bazerman for applications and grants. I am thinking here of what is referred to in constructiongrammar as a construction with ‘‘pragmatic point”. Fillmore et al. (1988: 506) describe pragmatic point as follows:

We find that in many cases idiomatic expressions have special pragmatic purposes associated with them. A large numberof substantive idioms have obvious associated pragmatic practices (e.g. Good morning, How do you do?, once upon a time)[. . .] others, like the type exemplified in Him be a doctor? appear to exist in the service of specific pragmatic or rhetoricalpurposes.

The final construction mentioned was described above in (2a). As I said there, it must be uttered as a response to a dubi-ous assertion or presupposition. Someone has to have said something about ‘‘him” becoming a doctor, and this propositionhas to be considered dubious or unlikely by the person who responds, as in (8).

(8) A: I think John will be a great doctor someday.B: Him be a doctor?!

However, B cannot simply use the construction out of the blue. This situational dependency—both as a response and inwhat it is responding to—are what Fillmore et al. are concerned with when they discuss a construction having pragmatic

21 An incongruence like this one also seems to be at the heart of Devitt’s concerns for focusing on individual forms in context while still maintaining an action-based approach. As she points out several times in her 2009 article, there does not appear to be consistent generic form across what appear to be instances ofthe same type of genre.



point, and it seems to parallel precisely the relation that Bazerman is concerned with regarding genres of grants and appli-cations. Both Bazerman’s genres and the pragmatic point idioms exist as means of acting within specific rhetorical situations.Similarly, pragmatic point constructions such as Good morning, and How do you do? either respond to or are used to createrhetorical situations which expect an often formulaic response. This kind of usage information becomes part of a construc-tion’s meaning in construction grammar.

7. Conclusion

As I remarked in the introduction to this essay, Bakhtin tells us that speech genres organize speech similar to the way thatgrammatical forms do. This paper suggests one means of exploring this idea within one contemporary theory of languageand language use. Thus, what I have attempted to do here, by way of analogy, is to illustrate that two different ways of think-ing about language and communication have potentially much to contribute to one another and that a framework like con-struction grammar suggests interesting answers for genre theorists about questions of form and function and action.

The construction as a form-meaning-function complex allows us to account for the common observation among action-based genre theorists that it is not just the visible form that is important in recognizing genres, but the invisible also. As Ihave shown above, instances of a particular construction can vary widely in form, and it is often usage facts along with for-mal facts that allow us to group instances together in the first place.

Similarly, construction grammar provides a means of discussing both the stable and variable aspects of form, and it allowsus to account for numerous different facts about its conventionalization across cultures, communities, and disciplines. Alongthese lines, the inheritance mechanisms of construction grammar provide a path toward understanding overlap in genericrelations as well as relations between genres that seem to be hierarchically related to one another. Thus, many aspects ofgenre studies seem to be addressable and motivated by the mechanisms of a single framework, which is itself the productof two decades of linguistic and psychological research. This present paper suggests a place to begin such an inquiry, but Ibelieve it has shown that this inquiry is productive for both rhetoricians and linguists.

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