Discourse genres in the PUCV-2006 academic and professional corpus of Spanish criteria, definitions, and examples

The identification and the classification of discourse genres have been one of the important concerns in linguistics studies. Particularly, since genres are analysed as complex objects and multi-dimensional approaches have been employed in order to capture their dynamic nature, more precise distinctive features have been determined. This chapter identifies, defines, classifies and exemplifies discourse genres emerging from the 491 texts forming the PUCV-2006 Academic and Professional Corpus of Spanish. In order to accomplish these objectives, we executed a complementary methodology of deductive and inductive nature. After analysing all the texts of the corpus, twenty-nine genres were identified and grouped. Interesting clusterings emerged reflecting cognitive, social, functional/communicative and linguistic variations.