A REVIEW OF GENERIC STRUCTURE POTENTIAL THEORY WITHIN SOME CONTEXTUAL PARADIGMS

Sade Olagunju (PhD)

Abstract


The paper reviews the Generic Structure Potential (Henceforth GSP) theory and its applications by scholars on various text genres.Several studies have been undertaken on the GSP of various genres in linguistic scholarship. The studiesinclude GSP of research articles, essays, newspaper editorials, football reports, shop transactions and quasi-judicial public hearing,  Christian Apologetics, among others, by Halliday and Hasan (1989); Paltridge (1993); Unuabonah (2012), Olagunju (2014) etc.Generic Structure Potential (GSP), a global textual resources and its contextual configuration were giving a better exposition. GSP elements identified by scholars are; obligatory, optional and ‘recursive’ (Unuabonah 2012; and Olagunju 2014).The generic structure being defined by the obligatory structural elements, allows for variations in texts.Moore and Tuckwell (2006) state that Generic Structure theory is a theory of the dynamic, bidirectional relationship between a text’s structure and the relevant features of the context in which that text occurs. That is, it attempts to account for the way a particular combination of contextual features (a contextual configuration in Hasan’s terms) activates a particular textual structure (i.e. particular genre), and the way the contextual configuration (CC) is simultaneously constructed by the meanings of that textual structure.The linguistic contents (at lexico-semantic level) of texts and its contextual configurations determine the global resources or GSP of that text.It must be noted that GSP as a theory has its own technically in terms of general symbols and sequencing.


Keywords


Generic Structure Potential, Contextual Configuration, Linguistic domain, Lexico-semantic, and Genre

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