Formal idioms and action: Toward a grammar of genres

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