One fruitful line of research has been to explore the local linguistic as well as
global rhetorical patterns of particular genres in order to identify their
recognizable structural identity, or what Bhatia (1999: 22) calls ‘generic
integrity’. In terms of methodology, to date most genre-based studies have
employed one or the other of Swales’ (1981/1990) move-analytic models of
text analysis to investigate whether or not the generic prototypical patterns that
he has introduced exist universally. This paper, however, considers the application
of the Systemic Functional (SF) theory of language to genre analysis. The paper
looks, in particular, at distinctive rhetorical features of English newspaper
editorials as an important public ‘Cinderella’ genre and
proposes a generic prototypical pattern of text development for editorials or what
Halliday and Hasan (1989) refer to as the Generic Structure Potential (GSP)
of a genre. The results of this study should benefit both genre theory and Systemic
Functional Linguistics (SFL) and will be, it seems, of interest not only to applied
linguists, but to those involved in education, journalism, and the media.
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