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142 Susanne Günthner

genre requirements by re-activating elements from the formal East German in-
stitutional style, mixed with features of what they assumed to be appropriate for
this new genre (Birkner and Kern 2000; Auer and Kern 2001). As various
studies on ‘crossing’ and ‘mixing’ phenomena in Germany reveal, new hybrid
nd
rd
forms and genres tend to develop among migrant children of the 2 and 3 gen-
eration of Turkish immigrants. Turkish genres, such as ‘ritual insults’ are be-
coming transformed and mixed with rap songs and routine formulas stemming
from German-Turkish comedy-shows (Füglein 2000, Hinnenkamp 2002).

4. Conclusions

Although this paper only outlines the issues, I hope it has nevertheless shown
how genres are part of a cultural system of signs and have “value loadings, so-
cial distributions, and typical performance styles according to which they are
shaped in the course of utterances” (Hanks 1987: 670).
As this overview shows, research on stylistic-rhetorical conventions for
handling particular (oral and written) genres turns out to be a fruitful approach
for studying intercultural communication. In combining genre analysis with in-
tercultural communication, the following questions arise:

(1) Do interactants from different cultural groups have similar repertoires of
genre?
(2) How are particular genres realized within a specific cultural group?
(3) Do seemingly similar genres have similar functions in these cultural groups?
(4) Are there culturally diverging stylistic evaluations of seemingly similar
genres?
(5) What kind of hybrid forms are emerging in what kind of contexts?

The analysis of communicative genres can prove to be an important link be-
tween language and culture, as in the actual production of utterances oriented to
a specific genre, where speakers not only produce culturally routinized conven-
tions of communication but also reconfirm, recreate or modify typified organiz-
ational forms of communicative behavior.
By establishing an analytic link between research of situatively produced
communicative practices, culturally conventionalized ways of organizing spe-
cific communicative activities (i.e. genres), and larger sociocultural contexts,
genre analysis provides an important methodological tool for studying intercul-
tural encounters.