The life of genre

Genreanalyysi – tekstilajitutkimuksen käytäntöä [Genre analysis – analysing texts in practice] (2012). Eds. Vesa Heikkinen, Eero Voutilainen, Petri Lauerma, Ulla Tiililä & Mikko Lounela.  Kotimaisten kielten keskuksen verkkojulkaisuja 29. Web publication PDF (3,7 MB). Helsinki:  Kotimaisten kielten keskus. Helsinki: Institute for the Languages of Finland.
URN:ISBN 978-952-5446-72-2, ISSN 1796-041X.
<URL http://scripta.kotus.fi/www/verkkojulkaisut/julk29/>.

Presentation translated by Marja Heikkinen, Transearly.

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Genre analysis – analysing texts in practice

We are victims to the genre. This is how the members of a rock band joked about their new video, when asked why it featured pin-up girls. The band’s ironic comment contains something essential about genres: they guide the way we act in different situations and the way we construe each other’s linguistic and other behaviour. Yet, we also constantly change genres through our actions. We live our everyday lives among different genres, and these genres live in us.

Genre analysis – analysing texts in practice delves into the life of multidisciplinary genre analysis. It aims to build bridges between different disciplines and ways of thinking – just like its sister publication Genreanalyysi – tekstilajitutkimuksen käsikirja [Handbook of Genre Analysis] (Heikkinen et al. eds. 2012). This web publication mainly focuses on the empirical: What kinds of genres are there? What are the different genres like? How can they be appropriately addressed in research?

The contributions to the “papers” section open up interesting perspectives on both the wide range of genres and the versatile practices of studying them. The papers analyse the Aristotelian conceptions of speech and the nature of speech at a more general level (Kakkuri-Knuuttila); language use in politics both in Parliament (Palonen) and in the printed media (Lassila); instruction (Vuori), official forms (Günther & Raitakari); legal texts (Piehl & Lounela); scientific papers (Kakkuri-Knuuttila & Kylänpää); other scientific and factual texts (Jantunen), web discussions (Lauhakangas), interpretations of a review of a musical album (Rahtu); and April Fool’s jokes (Visakko & Voutilainen). All the papers have undergone a peer review procedure.  

The papers in the “Reviews, observations, and statements” section discuss the ongoing research and analyses, display results and problems related to research processes, and inspire discussion about questions related to genres. This section analyses texts from upper secondary school (Heikkilä; Valtonen) and vocational education (Lankinen’s two papers). Working life texts are covered from the points of view of professional language (Koskela & Katajamäki) and legal language and law-drafting (Kankaanpää, Piehl & Räsänen). Encounters between the authorities and citizens are discussed through interrogation reports (Helenius) and different texts that aim to instruct people (Vuori). Corpus issues are in focus in two of the papers (Lauerma; Arppe & Lounela). The perspectives of language planning in practice (Hyvärinen) and plain language texts (Kulkki-Nieminen & Leskelä) are also presented. In addition, many specific questions are covered: the interpretation of historical genres (Sorvali), allusions in fiction (Niinimäki), the impact of the presumed established identity of a genre, in this specific case, that of obituaries, on the research design (Leskelä), and the yield of the analysis of temporal relations to genre studies (Uusikoski).

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PAPER OVERWIEV

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1. Prologue – The life of genre

Vesa Heikkinen, Eero Voutilainen, Petri Lauerma, Ulla Tiililä & Mikko Lounela

The brief prologue presents the characteristics of this publication and its relation to its sister publications Kielen piirteet ja tekstilajit. Vaikuttavia valintoja tekstistä toiseen [Linguistic features and genres. Influential choices from one text to another] (Heikkinen ed. 2009) and Genreanalyysi – tekstilajitutkimuksen käsikirja [Handbook of Genre Analysis] (Heikkinen et al. eds. 2012). One of the aims of this publication is to build bridges between different disciplines and ways of thinking.

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2. Papers

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The art of speech and Aristotle’s speech genres

Marja-Liisa Kakkuri-Knuuttila

This paper explores Aristotle’s conception about speeches and the art of speech on the basis of his work Rhetoric and the recent debates inspired by the work. First, the author shows that Aristotle’s conception about rhetoric and philosophical and dialectic dialogues corresponds to our present-day idea of different genres. The paper discusses the three major types of speech, i.e. political speech, judicial speech, and ceremonial speech, and presents the concept of topos as a tool for inventing and justifying arguments to support the main argument of a speech and its premises. Attention is also paid to, e.g., the differences between Plato’s and Aristotle’s conceptions of the relationships between the art of speech and ethics. While Plato’s ideal was a philosophical art of speech, pursuing good life, Aristotle aimed at improving the orators’ ability to speak in a truthful and persuasive manner. 

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Parlamentary rhetoric – the style of weighing and persuasive politics

Kari Palonen

Palonen’s paper discusses the nature of parliamentary rhetoric. Parliamentarism refers to a special political style that combines government’s responsibility towards Parliament and the aspects of parliamentary practices and parliamentary rhetorical culture. The rhetorical meaning of parliamentarism also manifests itself in how parliamentary membership shapes a person’s political profile: the members are expected to speak in a new way, to the parliamentary audience, following the conventions of parliamentary political culture. The paper looks at parliamentary speeches in relation to the long established history of rhetoric, highlighting the significance of the parliamentary institution and its emblematic political culture for parliamentary speeches. At the end of the paper, a new angle is adopted and the different aspects of parliamentary speech are considered in proportion to the historical typifications. The paper aims at providing the readers with tools for adopting reading skills in parliamentary rhetoric and teaching people to read political speech in parliamentary minutes and documents.


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Credibly from the past on the way to the future? The genres of the youth organization Naši as conditions for political communications

Jussi Lassila

The idea of a nation as an imaginary community constitutes an excellent, possibly even unavoidable, premise for many research projects associated with national identity. In fact, we could say that there are no nations or national identities as such but they are imagined linguistically, visually, through sounds, texts, speeches, sports events, state symbols, etc. Lassila’s paper tests this hypothesis on present-day Russia, where the past ten years have witnessed a strong searching and working for a national identity. This entails, to a large degree, searching and working for precisely such an imaginary community spirit. The paper focuses on one specific fragment of the work for a national identity in present-day Russia: the generic features of the texts produced by the Kremlin-minded youth organization Naši on their official website as part of the organization’s political communications. The texts on the website can be regarded as crystallizations of the choices through which Naši wishes to express itself from the perspective of its political status, constructing an image of ideal youth. In other words, the texts and their generic choices are part of the organization’s political communications, and their analysis reveals the conditions and requirements for the activities the organization must be able to accommodate to. These genres can also be considered to represent the work for a national identity and the related ideal youth in a wider sense.

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Genres in citizen instruction

Jaana Vuori

This paper discusses the genres of instruction in present-day society. The genres are addressed from the perspective of social practices, instead of addressing them from the perspective of linguistic conventions. A wider social scientific framework is provided by the debate on social power as the governing power. When adopting a wider social scientific definition of instruction, almost any text can be approached as instructive. The paper first outlines a social scientific angle to the analysis of governmentality. Instruction is defined within this framework, and instructive texts are perceived as a core part of a broad-ranging guiding of people’s actions through information, guidelines, moral ends, and objects of identification. The perspective suggested by governmentality on instruction is made more concrete by regarding it as citizen education: how does instruction aim to provide citizens with such skills and knowledge that they can be expected to cope independently in society? Following this, a number of research questions that can also be answered by close linguistic interpretation are suggested. The examples chosen represent special situations where people are expected to grow into citizens: becoming a parent for the first time, and immigrating into Finland. Finally, the author reverts to the questions of interpreting genres and combining social scientific and linguistic analyses.


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Mental health rehabilitation guided by an open and detailed planning form

Kirsi Günther & Suvi Raitakari

Human life is being planned and recorded at an ever-accelerating pace. Starting from early childhood, our lives are made subject to various early childhood education and care plans, and study plans. When a person is deemed to be in need of special care and support, various education, support, and treatment planning forms enter the scene.  When professionals plan the support and help needed by a person, they will leave records in the electronic data systems and documents of, e.g., counselling bureaus, day care centres, schools, and social and health care.  Planning treatment and support generate textual products that are entangled in the interaction between the professional and the client. The paper analyses an old form used in the everyday client situations of mental health rehabilitation and a new planning form introduced as a result of the purchaser – producer model. The analysis of these two forms shows how the forms change as the service system of mental health rehabilitation system is reshaped. The planning forms are analysed by means of text analysis, and the concepts of genre, category, and context are used as tools of analysis. The analysis shows how the idea of a client changes, as the forms change in practice. Finally, the authors discuss how the empty forms analysed are based on different conceptions about clients and different purposes.


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Semi-automatic analysis of textual quotes

Aino Piehl & Mikko Lounela

This paper aims to present and test the use of n-strings, i.e. strings of specific length consisting of words, in the identification of similarities between texts and, on the basis of these similarities, the identification of quotes from one text to another.  The paper investigates whether a semi-automatic method can be used to detect quotes reliably even in large corpora. Most typically, n-strings have been used in text analysis to detect such expressions characteristic of a given genre or an author that consist of several words, thereby forming variable word strings. What links the present paper with this branch of research above all is an interest in the variation the strings display. The paper starts with an overview of the use of n-strings in genre analysis. The authors then move on to describe the background of the present research project and the phenomenon of loaning, typical of legal texts. After that, testing the methodology is described, followed by an evaluation of its results. 


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The structure of a scientific paper: historical and prehistorical perspectives

Marja-Liisa Kakkuri-Knuuttila & Antti Kylänpää

Despite the interest shown towards scientific texts in rhetoric and linguistics, they are a topic that has only been discussed to a limited degree in philosophy of science. However, there are certain significant exceptions among philosophers of science. They have made it evident that it is time to analyse the structure of scientific papers as a whole from an epistemological perspective. Thus, philosophers of science should try to analyse what the main claims and arguments of a scientific paper are, and to evaluate the audience of the scientific paper. The present paper aims to answer these challenges. The analysis shows that the main argument of a scientific paper does not equal the findings of the research as such, as is widely presumed in philosophy of science. The findings are just an intermediary step towards the contribution of a study. The main argument of a study does not consist of the justifications provided to support the findings but rather of justifications that are used to demonstrate the novelty of the finding in relation to previous research.  The significance of making a difference between the finding and the contribution is justified in this paper by an analysis of certain historical texts. At the end of the paper, certain epistemological problems following the differentiation between the findings and the contribution are pointed out.


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Academic and popular texts in corpus comparison: word lists, key words, and phraseological units

Jarmo H. Jantunen

Scientific style is simple and clear, accurate and convincing. It is based on good standard language and factual style. Descriptions like this are widespread when the characteristics of scientific texts are discussed. However, the range of scientific texts is broad, and even single texts, e.g., research papers, contain sections that differ from each other in their purpose, contents, even language. This paper discusses two genres falling under the umbrella genre of scientific texts that are close to each other as regards, e.g., their functions. The analysis addresses popular texts intended for the general public and academic texts with a narrower audience. The shared function of both genres is knowledge sharing. The paper assumes a quantitative perspective on text types and the analyses are based on corpus material. The analysis focuses especially on the recurring vocabulary in the genres: the paper aims to analyse how the two close genres differ from each other lexically. The objective is not to give a comprehensive description of the lexicon of the genres but rather to focus on the expressions the corpus-driven research method suggests as hypothetically interesting. A core research object is the generic key words distinguishing different genres from each other. The paper presents three different interlinked methods that form a continuum: it progresses from word lists to key words and further to a closer key word analysis.


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How to study the proverb tradition in web texts?

Outi Lauhakangas

This paper investigates the functions of the use of proverbs in internet texts. The approach is multidisciplinary with a social psychological focus. The theme selected is Finnish envy; it is explored by analysing how the Finnish proverb  Kateus vie kalatkin vedestä  - Envy takes even the fish out of the water – with its variants works in discussions and comments. In the 21st century, the internet has opened up new opportunities to investigate how combining written culture with the various language use practices of different discursive communities has affected the use of proverbs. The situation is ideal from the perspective of analysing the contexts of proverbs. Web texts complete the fragmented picture of everyday spoken culture that has been gained by recording the use of proverbs by different communities. The study indicates that proverbs and their variants are used especially in certain specific genres, including letters to the editor and journal-like ponderings. It shows that even by making very simple searches it is possible to compile corpora that contain essential information from the point of view of the everyday use of proverbs.


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Genres as a key to ironic interpretation

Toini Rahtu

Toini Rahtu’s paper investigates genres as a unit of meaning. It is based on the idea that genres are not just, as it were, an external casting mould in which the “contents” of a text are poured, but that they are also part of the meaning as such. The interpretation of a genre occurs parallel to the interpretation of the other meanings in a text; it combines symbols with both each other and the external context. The study suggests that certain genres, such as causeries and columns, lead people to expect irony, whereas with other genres, such as official notifications, irony is hardly expected. The present paper illustrates the impact of genre on the interpretation of texts through an analysis of a music album review written in letter format, including people’s interpretations of the review. The paper shows that interpreting a sample text as ironic varies according to how its genre is perceived.


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April Fool’s jokes as a genre 

Tomi Visakko & Eero Voutilainen

On April Fool’s Day, the media have an unofficial right to depart from the requirement of reliability and to plant an article with false information among the rest of the information shared. The jokes often aim to make people act in some way, e.g., to pursue some kind of a free benefit or to complain about an offensive decision. This paper shows that April Fool’s Day articles are in some ways challenging from the perspective of the oft-adopted linguistic definitions of a genre.  Neither a structural nor a functional view of genres would seem to apply to the description of April Fool’s Day jokes in an entirely satisfactory way. The paper starts by considering the core functioning principles of an April Fool’s Day article at a general level. It then moves on to analyse what types of linguistic features function as hints guiding the readers to recognize the April Fool’s Day articles as jokes and what shared generic features the articles have.  Finally, problems related to the definition of a genre are discussed, together with what kinds of socio-cultural functions April Fool’s articles may be thought to have.  The analysis covers 106 April Fool’s Day joke articles published in the Finnish printed media from 1977 to 2012.


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3. Reviews, observations, and statements

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On the representativeness and reliability of corpora

Antti Arppe & Mikko Lounela

Whilst analysing language, texts, and genres empirically, based on a corpus, some questions on the corpus, research object, and their relationship must be answered, at least implicitly. One of the core questions is that of representativeness: what does the chosen or self-compiled corpus represent? Is it possible to answer questions relevant from the perspective of research in a reliable manner by analysing the corpus? Representativeness is one of the basic concepts of statistics and it has been accurately defined in that connection. This paper discusses the notion of statistic representativeness in relation to (corpus-driven) linguistics and its practices, associating representativeness with the reliability of the conclusions made on the basis of the corpus. Some solutions to the problem of representativeness are suggested: cross-examining the research object, making a clear distinction between the results and conclusions drawn from them and applying the notion of presumed genre – together with combining these suggestions.


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Corpus of Early Modern Finnish and its textual representativeness

Petri Lauerma

This paper presents the Early Modern Finnish corpus. It was compiled as a result of the need to produce a source of material covering an entire era that had remained empirically difficult to approach, stuck between two large dictionary projects within Fennistics. While the natural ending point of the Dictionary of Old Literary Finnish had been defined as the end of the Swedish rule and the Dictionary of Modern Finnish covered material from the end of the 1880s onwards (with the exception of the works by the Finnish national author Aleksis Kivi), the entire era of Early Modern Finnish (c. 1810–1880/1890) had been left without attention in practice. As the situation was only appreciated by the beginning of the 1990s, the automatic solution was not only to compile a dictionary of the period but the Research Institute for the Languages of Finland decided to construct a large corpus that would offer material to those interested in both vocabulary and other linguistic features. The present paper discusses the selection criteria used in the compilation of the corpus. The most important criteria were the recognition the work enjoyed, its general coverage, and its early date. In contrast, the generic perspective – with the exception of a distinction between prose and poetry – was not really considered whilst planning the corpus. Nevertheless, the corpus contains material of most genres that were used or started to emerge especially at the beginning of the 19th century.


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Problems of interpreting historical texts

Irma Sorvali

The paper discusses, through two case examples, what kinds of decisions a researcher must make whilst analysing texts that represent historical cultural environments. The first case is a historical work written in Latin from the 6th century, and the second case is a runic inscription from the Faroe Islands of the Viking period. The paper shows that in the interpretation of old texts, it is especially the context and its understanding that causes problems. In general, the longer the temporal and cultural distance of the text to be interpreted, the more uncertain the interpretation becomes. To do their work, researchers need knowledge, skills, and methodological help not only in the fields of linguistics and translation theory, but also in other fields of science, including semiotics, which also covers drawings and other visual material. There may not necessarily be just one solution, but they can be several, and sometimes a question may lead to a new question or be left entirely unanswered.


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Temporal relations as a tool for genre analysis

Risto Uusikoski

This paper discusses the use of the analysis of temporal relations as a tool for genre analysis. First, the concept of tempus is discussed, together with the types of temporal relations. Second, the concept of temporal perspective is presented, which acts as a link between the linguistic system and research into language use. In this connection, even other phenomena besides tempus that manifest temporal relations are discussed. The author then moves on to analyse the perspective of temporal relations through concepts of the systemic-functional theory by metafunctions, after which he focuses on move analysis.  These discussions are followed by a brief summary. The paper’s objective is twofold. On the one hand, it adopts a genre theory lens: the purpose is to show how the analysis of temporal relations may turn out fruitful from the point of view of the methods chosen (metafunctions and move analysis). On the other hand, the review aims to broaden the scope of analysing temporal relations from a phenomenon that covers merely the linguistic system to a wider phenomenon that is also associated with language use. This brings new problems and questions to the scope of linguistics.


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Biblical allusions in the novel Moreeni – key to the work and its interpretation? 

Anneli Niinimäki

This paper analyses how intertextuality constructs the generic identity of Lauri Viita’s novel Moreeni published in 1950. Moreeni’s links to the Bible are numerous and versatile. In this paper, these links are referred to by the term allusion. It means an indirect reference to another text detected by the reader. Allusions may be considered to affect Moreeni’s generic identity at many levels.  Firstly, Viita uses the phrasified sayings of the Bible as raw material in his own poetic language. Secondly, detecting the allusions affects the meanings the readers will assign to the work. The paper underscores the fact that time changes the interpretation of the work, and even generic identity can be approached from different perspectives. The contemporary criticism paid attention principally to the social and historical themes of the work, instead of, e.g., the numerous Biblical references or their relation to the novel’s theme. The paper also seeks to answer the question of whether the Biblical associations influence more specific generic considerations: are we actually dealing with a realistic novel rather than a modern one?


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Analysing obituaries: how does the presupposed established identity affect research design? 

Henna Leskelä

This paper discusses obituaries published in the Finland-Swedish newspaper Hufvudstadsbladet as a genre. In particular, the author opens an essential discussion from the perspective of genre analyses on how generic presumptions affect the research design in practice. Many genres involve strong presumptions: for example, obituaries are often considered stable and established as a genre. How does this affect research? What should, e.g., students working on their pro gradu theses observe about the effects of these presumptions on their analysis? The paper starts off by a general discussion on obituaries and their background. After that, a type of genre theory that could be useful in such research is discussed. Then the author presents her preliminary observations about obituaries as a genre, followed by a final discussion on the problems in principle related to research design.


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How to analyse the birth of a legal text and the boundaries of a genre? Text analysis, suggestions for change, and participant observation

Salli Kankaanpää, Aino Piehl & Matti Räsänen

This paper presents a research and language planning project titled The Shaping of legal texts. The project produced information about the linguistic solutions in legal texts on the one hand and about their grounds on the other hand. It also generated information about how different methods serve research into genres. The paper presents a report on the different phases of the research project. First, the objectives and questions of the project are discussed. Second, practical questions are brought up, e.g., how the authors were admitted to the law-drafting project and how the project schedule affected the language planning and research project. Third, some of the methods are described in closer detail: Aino Piehl describes how language planning proposals were made and how their reception was analysed and Salli Kankaanpää describes the analysis of discussion on language on the basis of the minutes of the law-drafting working group. Both of these descriptive sections focus not only on the methods but also on the preliminary results of the project. Finally, the methods and their usefulness are evaluated from the perspective of the entire project.


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Interrogation report as an official text

Jutta Helenius

Interrogation reports, included in interrogation minutes, are common official texts, yet they have only been studied to a limited degree from the point of view of the Finnish language. This paper introduces the concept of official texts: it seeks to underscore the status of the police officer writing the interrogation report as an official. Interrogation reports are authoritative and socially significant texts, since they are part of the very core of the pre-trial investigation procedure. Many Finns will be likely to face a pre-trial procedure and the related interrogation report at some stage of their lives, at least as complainants or witnesses. This paper discusses the nature of the interrogation report as a genre, especially as an official text. It also touches upon questions related to text production and consumption, and takes a stand towards interrogation reports as research material. A wider context of the paper is that of legal linguistics, which focuses on the linguistic methods of investigating legal language and its use.


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Genres of present-day instruction

Jaana Vuori

In her paper “Genres in citizen instruction” in the present publication (see above), Jaana Vuori defined instruction as meta genres rather than one genre with clear boundaries. In this paper, which supplements Vuori’s previous paper, she poses the question of what these genres of instruction are in present-day society. According to Vuori, almost any text can be analysed from the point of view of instruction in principle. This paper also sheds light on genres that are there principally for other functions: guide books and brochures, guidelines, forms, notes, books on social debate, textbooks, laymen’s stories, and media texts. 


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On studying texts in professional language – the case of auditors’ reports

Merja Koskela & Heli Katajamäki

Disciplines are usually classified according to their research objects, objectives, or theoretical basis. For example, linguistic text analysis is defined according to both the research object (text) and its theoretical basis (linguistics). In the same way, research into professional language is best defined according to its research object. Research into professional language focuses on oral and written texts from different special branches where such features are identified that are, on the one hand, characteristic of that particular special branch and the communicative situations typical of the branch and, on the other hand, characteristic of texts in professional language in general. This paper defines the concept professional language from the perspective of its purpose of use. Professional language is a whole consisting of the linguistic means that are used in connections limited to a special branch in order to enable mutual understanding between the operators in that branch. Thus, language is understood as a tool for information sharing, optimal for conveying certain specific informative contents in particular. According to the paper, research into professional language texts has a strong connection to present-day professions and society. This is why researchers may find interesting any texts that are used in a professional community. In the present paper, the authors analyse an auditors’ report as a case example, a presumably established genre with a specific predetermined form. The authors analyse what guides the structure of the auditors’ report, what causes variation, who is allowed to write the reports, and what they are used for. 


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How organized is writing as an activity? Perspectives of developmental work research

Pasi Lankinen

The job descriptions of teachers at universities of applied sciences have undergone quite a change. Both the Polytechnics Act and the universities’ individual strategies define the teachers’ tasks as including not only traditional tuition but also the development of the tuition in their specific field by following working life, and engaging in research and development activities. Since research and development activities are usually assessed in terms of the number of texts published, it would be important to create some kind of a structure supporting the writing process in polytechnics to further develop the activities.  The present paper discusses the degree of organization of writing especially from the point of view of developmental work research.  As a case example, a set of experiences gathered during a certain training event are discussed. One significant observation is that whilst teaching writing, it would seem to be more useful to develop the writing activities comprehensively in the whole community than to simply discuss individual genres. The nature of writing should be re-evaluated.


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University of applied sciences theses as an object of generic changes. Review of the discussions on the topic

Pasi Lankinen

This paper discusses the debate on the genre (or genres) titled as university of applied sciences thesis that has been going on roughly since the 2003 Polytechnics Act determined the tasks of the universities of applied sciences as not only tuition but also research and development, and regional influencing. According to the paper, a statutory change in a community’s tasks will unavoidably affect the community’s operations. As social practices change, even the system of genres intertwined in the practices changes – and the changes in the genres affect the social practices. If the thesis is modified as a genre, even the activities related to the drafting and supervising of the thesis change to correspond to the new idea of the genre.  This paper suggests that the debate over theses prepared at universities of applied sciences is interesting from the perspective of text analysis even in a wider and more general perspective. It entails activities aimed at a generic change or at least activities accelerating the generic change, where the points of emphasis associated with the development of the genre have been justified partly also through text analytical concepts. For a deeper exploration of the subject matter, e.g., the concepts of context and discourse community are offered. The present review makes use of them both whilst discussing in what kinds of connections the university of applied sciences theses are prepared and interpreted, and what kinds of readers and ends they are intended for.


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Genres written in the mother tongue test of the matriculation examination

Päivi Valtonen

Päivi Valtonen’s paper discusses the generic features of the typical texts written by pupils in the mother tongue test of the matriculation examination, i.e. essay and text skills assignment.  It also describes what other genres have been required in the tests and what possible challenges the tests may involve. The topic is briefly grounded by introducing different approaches to writing and presenting the genres employed in upper secondary school writing on the basis of the curriculum and a number of textbooks. The paper concludes that writing in upper secondary school, together with its development, would benefit from some type of general genre theory and analysis. The genres written in the matriculation examination are in a key position whilst analysing the candidates’ understanding of genres and thereby also the adoption and nature of community-specific textual conventions in a wider sense.  


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From the front page image to Saarinen’s shot. References to images in essays based on picture material

Elina Heikkilä

In the mother tongue test of the matriculation examination – presently an essay test – Finnish candidates for the matriculation examination have had the chance to write about pictures since the 1990s. The present paper analyses the candidates’ references to picture material: how the references organize the text and what their grammatical structure is like. The paper focuses on explicit references to the picture material, i.e. specific noun phrases with picture referents, nouns and pronouns with their qualifiers; the essays, of course, also contain other types of references to pictures. The observations are based on twenty essays from the year 2001. The candidates were tasked to “analyse and evaluate” two newspaper pictures with sports themes. Twelve of the essays were given the lowest passing grade approbatur, whereas eight of them received eximia or laudatur, the highest two grades. What the essays receiving approbatur and eximia had in common was an attempt to refer accurately to the material; even the distribution of the reference words was similar. However, there were differences in the frequency of the references, the share of co-referencing, and the qualifier relationships of the picture references. The essays graded approbatur had more frequent references to pictures than the essays receiving eximia, where explicit picture references where intertwined with implicit ones.  The essays graded eximia used more co-references, as the writers compared the pictures to be analysed with each other and with other pictures. The writers graded eximia also mixed specific and generic references and varied the phrasal position of the picture references. 


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Genre, language planning, and education

Riitta Hyvärinen

This paper is based on the author’s own and her colleagues’ experience on the relationship of language and genre education to genre knowledge. The author has worked as a language planner and educator at the Finnish Language Office of the Institute for the Languages of Finland. The objective is to shed light especially on the practical experience on the genre knowledge of people participating in the courses by the Finnish Language Office. According to the author, both the course participants and the educators display a complex relationship to genres. For example, even the word genre often seems downright unusable, even though it is necessary to talk about genres. 


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Adapting texts into plain language and genres 

Auli Kulkki-Nieminen & Leealaura Leskelä

Clarity is a generic feature of fact texts, considered to improve comprehensibility and to promote interaction. In Finland, actual plain-language communications have been developed since the early 1980s, with the objective of creating a linguistic form intended especially for special groups, experienced as a type of an aid. Developing plain-language communications has a strong social basis and ideological connection to accessibility, foregrounding equal opportunities to use services and participate in society. The present paper makes an overview of texts produced by adapting them into plain language and discusses how the adaptation affects texts representing different genres. At the beginning, plain-language communications are linked to genres, and plain-language adaptation is analysed on the basis of text analysis. After that, the most common genres published in plain language are described through examples, categorizing them according to their communicative purpose. The paper discusses media texts, other informative texts, and fiction in separate sections.

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