Tipologia, topologia, topografia: a semântica dos gêneros

Abstract

The central concept of genre is redefined to emphasize relations between genres and make possible a model of genre change. In doing so a new order of cultural semiotic formation is proposed, intermediate between general semiotic resources (e.g. lexicogrammar) and particular instances (e.g. texts). The theoretical framework of social semiotics, generalizing from Halliday’s functional grammar and emphasizing that cultural forms are the product of human activity and constantly changing on many timescales is described and developed. Genres are not merely classified (typology), but their internal semantic structure (topography) is used to locate them in multidimensional semantic spaces where their degrees of similarity and difference can be envisioned as nearness or distance from one another (topology).