Institutional Settings on the Web: Linking Processes and the Dissolution of Genre Boundaries

The Web domain can be considered as a hyperdomain, or rather as a blended domain, since it merges different practices from different domains within each single representation. No matter what the function of a single site is, its primary condition is embedded in the hypertextual and interactive nature of the medium that hosts the site and extends it in terms of multiplicity of affordances. This process leads users/readers to produce and consume blurred digital genres where interdiscursivity (Bathia 2004, 2007) plays a fundamental role. Furthermore, dynamism (Berkenkotter and Huckin 1995) is instantiated by genre fluidity in shifting simultaneously from one mode to another, from one sign system to another, from one genre to another. This study highlights new organizational aspects of textuality and also new discursive practices of digital genres focusing on institutional settings, in particular on the official European Union website. Institutional Web pages are then the artefacts where the dissolution of boundaries among genres, semiotic resources, and domains of practice takes place. What characterizes this phenomenon is the presence of linking processes along with multimodality. These two constitutive properties are necessary since they ease language into entrapping and managing the huge amount of information present within an institutional website. In the light of these constitutive elements, the conventional parameters of traditional genres need to be revised and a new framework of specific attributes for Web genres is here proposed.