Oral Genres. Concepts and Complexities

This chapter explores the notion of ‘genre’ in the oral medium. Despite the importance of style and of situational factors in sociolinguistics, genre has not been central to sociolinguistic debate, particularly as regards spoken discourse. Moreover, most research on oral genres relates to the English language: with the exception of Spanish, the Romance languages have not featured strongly. After a discussion of theoretical and methodological issues, the core of this chapter will explore the complexities around the concept of ‘oral genres’ through a series of case studies from French. Analysing a range of features across several corpora of different varieties of oral French, it will focus, in particular, on the notion of ‘hybridity’, widely acknowledged as a core property of spoken genres, and on the relationship between genre, register and medium. The chapter will end with a discussion of future avenues for research.