Analysing Genre: The Colony Text of UNESCO Resolutions
Analysing Genre: The Colony Text of UNESCO Resolutions

Author(s): Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova
Subject(s): International Law, Pragmatics, Stylistics
Published by: Masarykova univerzita nakladatelství
Keywords: international law; Conventions; Resolutions; UNSECO; Colony text; genre;
Summary/Abstract: This book analyzes the genre of resolutions in an attempt to explain the specific way discourse is constructed and interpreted in the context of intergovernmental institutional interaction practiced by the UNESCO discourse community to achieve its specific communicative goals. Undertaken primarily from the viewpoints of sociolinguistics, stylistics and pragmatics, it uses the genre analysis approach and aims at the study of text typology and stylistic variation in association with the contextual constraints on discourse production and processing. The corpus-based study is carried out from both the synchronic and the diachronic points of view in an attempt to characterize a genre and its development over a sixty-year period. The diachronic research focuses on the development and changes the genre has undergone from its implementation in the United Nations system up to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Since the `Resolutions' volumes are categorized as an instance of the colony text type, their structure and distinctive features are related to the specificity of this kind of written discourse. The investigation into the current state of the genre explores the generic structure of resolutions and their style markers. The analysis of the style markers of the genre is related to the major strategies used to build up discourse coherence and to some pragmatic issues, such as speech acts and politeness phenomena.

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