GENRE VS DISCOURSE: CONCERNING THE NOTIONS RELATIONSHIP

The paper considers the dialectical relations of two categories – genre and discourse, which are not definitely interpreted in the modern linguistic research. The author notes that the concept of genre is widely used in the discursive analysis; however, the genre problematics is still unexplored. The goal of this work is the consideration of interrelation of genre and discourse, the identification of their touch points. The paper analyses three main approaches to the notion of a genre – extralinguistic, structural and formal. The author comes to the conclusion that only the combination of extralinguistic and linguistic parameters will allow defining the notion of the genre more exactly and drawing the line between genre and discourse. The paper highlights the inconsistency of efforts to identify genre and discourse. Basing on M. Foucault’s concept, the author explains that discourse is constituted by the complex system of limitations imposed by the discursive structure, when the genre is defined by the creative potential. The term “discourse” covers certain spheres of discursive practices, the boundaries of which can be defined by the separation of their class features, and the term “genre” is used to define the invariant properties of the discursive practices. The author notes that genre acts as a flexible category of discursive activity, means of discourse ordering. The genre is not only the classification system of discursive practices or some formula of language structures but, first of all, the communicative phenomenon reflecting the process and the result of the discursive activity.