Hasan's Generic Structure Potential

Matthiessen (1995: 53):

A genre or register is the linguistic reflection of a contextual configuration; "genre is language doing the job appropriate to that class of social happenings" that a particular contextual configuration constitutes (Hasan 1985: 108).

From the point of view of text structure, a genre corresponding to a particular contextual configuration is reflected in a range or repertoire of structures available as a resource for that genre. This is what Hasan calls the Generic Structure Potential (GSP) of a genre. The GSP she gives for service encounters is as follows.

[ ( <Greeting> . ) (Sale Initiation) ^] [ (Sale Enquiry * ·) (Sale Request ^ Sale Compliance)*^ Sale ^ Purchase ^ Purchase Closure( ^ Finis)

Blogger Comments:

[1] To be clear, here Hasan is using 'genre' in the sense of text type, rather than rhetorical mode (context).

[2] To be clear, for Hasan, Generic Structure Potential is concerned with the semantic structure of a text type (genre) that realises the configuration of field, tenor and mode features of a situation type.