definitive form in the mid-nineteenth century with mass literacy and the popularity of cookbooks; such an interpretation would require of course a great deal of evidence to
validate. Kittredge too notes the omission of definite articles in recipe language, a feature that characterizes many so-called simplified registers of English Ferguson
1983. French recipe language shares both of these English register features to some extent, but the incidence of the omissions is much lower, and the history of the register,
to my knowledge, has not been studied.
2.3 Genre
The theory of Genre is used in the context of this research to observe more on the appropriateness of idea organization in Wikipedia Biographies. The researcher believes
that this theory is relevant to conduct this research because the Genre theory as stated by Biber and Finegan 1994 focuses on the message type that recurs regularly in a
community in terms of semantic content, participants, occasions of use, and so on will tend over time to develop an identifying internal structure, differentiated from other
message types in the repertoire of the community p.21. Here, it is defined that a certain message type is generated due to the result of regular community recurring.
Further, Lee 2000 discusses the topic on genre through the scope of the usually confused differences between genre and text type which are widely discussed in many
corpus-based research. Coming back to the distinction between genre and text type, therefore, the main thing to remember here is what the two different approaches to
classification mean for texts and their categorization p.39. In theory, two texts may PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
belong to the same text type in Bibers sense even though they may come from two different genres because they have some similarities in linguistic form e.g., biographies
and novels are similar in terms of some typically past-tense, third-person narrative linguistic features p.39. This highly restricted use of text type is an attempt to account
for variation within and across genres and hence, in a way, to go above and beyond genre in linguistic investigations. Bibers 1989, p. 6 use of the term, for example, is
prompted by his belief that genre distinctions do not adequately represent the underlying text types of
English …; linguistically distinct texts within a genre represent different text types; linguistically similar texts from different genres represent a single
text type. An easy way to describe the distinction between text type and genre can be seen
through this table:
In summary, Lee states that text type is still an elusive concept which cannot yet be established explicitly in terms of linguistic features, perhaps the looser use of the
term by people such as Faigley and Meyer 1983 may be just as useful: they use text PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
type in the sense of the traditional four-part rhetorical categories of narrative, description, exposition and argumentation. Steen 1999, p. 113 similarly calls these
four classes types of discourse. Stubbs 1996, p. 11, on the other hand, uses text type and genre interchangeably, in common, perhaps, with most other linguists. At present,
such usages of text type which do not observe the distinctions Biber and EAGLES try to make are perhaps as consistent and sensible as any, as long as people make it clear
how they are using the terms. It does seem redundant, however, to have two terms, each carrying its own historical baggage, both covering the same ground.
2.4 Wikipedia’s Guideline of Writing a Biography
