Discourse types

The term discourse type is preferred to other labels which might be encountered in linguistics, such as text-type or genre since, for some, text-type implies work on written texts, whereas much of CADS has been carried out on spoken discourse, and genre is a term which is accompanied by huge baggage in literature, and some of the discourse types we may wish to examine might not meet everyone’s criteria of what constitutes a “genre”. For instance, Parliamentary debates on the Iraq war, White House press briefings, or the speeches of Silvio Berlusconi, all objects of recent Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) scrutiny, may not be classifiable as separate genres.