Web-mediated Genres: A Challenge to Traditional Genre Theory

This paper explores the possibility of extending the functional genre model to account for non-linear, multi-modal, web-mediated documents. It adds a two-dimensional perspective to the genre analysis model in order to account for the fact that web documents not only act as text but also as medium. A substantial part of the paper is devoted to a discussion of the function of links; mainly because functional approaches to links are scares and because regarding links as constituents in the genre analysis model marks a significant departure from traditional genre analysis. Most exemplary material for the theoretical discussion is the homepage (the first, introductory page on a website) and so the paper also provides a tentative characterisation of the homepage as a web genre.