@article {912, title = {Genre and the Museum Exhibition}, journal = {Linguistics and the Human Sciences}, volume = {2}, year = {2006}, month = {2006}, pages = {299{\textendash}317}, abstract = {This paper applies a linguistic understanding of genre to the domain of museumexhibitions, interpreting these exhibitions as communicative texts. Genre will be seen to be not just a useful metaphor, but an important analytical tool in approaching the analysis of museum exhibitions as texts. Two concurrent exhibitions from a science and technology museum are compared in terms of genre, and it is argued that genre is a useful tool for identifying their distinctive social purposes. It is also noted that the unique nature of these complex, three-dimensional, multimodal texts requires some of the linguistic understandings of genre to be adapted. Connections are made both {\textquoteleft}below{\textquoteright}, to aspects of register variation, and {\textquoteleft}above{\textquoteright}, to the ideological stance and communicative potential of the museum as a whole as a communicative entity. }, keywords = {genre, multimodal, museum, systemic-functional linguistics, text}, author = {Ravelli, Louise J.} }