File Not Found: Error 404 as an Example of a Spontaneous Web Genre
The development of the Internet has led to the emergence of new digital genres, also known as cybergenres or web genres. The existing research into diverse web pages has revealed that the new medium not only generated changes in traditional genres (reproduced or adapted) but also created a number...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Cracow Tertium Society for the Promotion of Language Studies
2018-01-01
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| Series: | Półrocznik Językoznawczy Tertium |
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| Online Access: | https://journal.tertium.edu.pl/index.php/JaK/article/view/57 |
| Summary: | The development of the Internet has led to the emergence of new digital genres, also known as
cybergenres or web genres. The existing research into diverse web pages has revealed that the
new medium not only generated changes in traditional genres (reproduced or adapted) but also
created a number of novel genres. The creation, development and nature of spontaneous genres
are connected with the evolution of the web since they have no counterparts in traditional media.
The present study deals with one of them: it concentrates on the genre analysis of a small set of
35 web pages representing the 404 error message genre, which are automatically generated to
indicate that a server cannot find the page requested by a web user who follows a dead or broken link. The paper presents the origins of the genre in question, its structure, content and
communicative purposes. The research has been carried out by means of the methodology of
genre analysis proposed by John Swales (1990). Four moves that express the communicative
purposes of 404 error have been identified and the commonest rhetoric choices have been
analyzed. Additionally, the paper presents a selection of unusual, ingenious or funny 404 error
pages. |
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| ISSN: | 2543-7844 2543-7844 |