A Cognitive Approach to the Nature of Literary Genres

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Abstract:

The paper challenges the mainstream perspectives on the character of literary genre. Usually, a genre is perceived as pertaining to the processes of identification-communication and not as belonging to the category of defining-classifying phenomena. Therefore, while analyzing and interpreting which genre a given text belongs to, we should first take into account the extent to which genologic categories are open – depending on how we determine the very existence of prototypes (within respective categories) and the family resemblance relations (which indicate the so-called prototype effect) between texts regarded as members of the same category. In one crucial respect, however, we should, first and foremost, consider the level of reception of the analyzed text. If we then assume that the very act of reading a text entails an act of communication between the sender and the recipient of this text, literary genres should be interpreted in the categories of fixed, conventional speech genres.

Keywords:

literary genres, cognitive linguistics, prototype theory, categories and categorization, family resemblance.

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