A Genre Analysis of the Autobiographical Web Pages of Third Wave Coffee Shops in Türkiye

Abstract

Sections titled “About Us”, “Who We Are” and similar, termed “autobiographical web pages” (AWPs) in this study, are a common feature of many websites, with a shared communicative goal of informing the reader about the organisation(s), institution(s), commercial entity/-ies, and/or person(s) behind them. Genre analyses of autobiographical web pages so far have focused on institutional and corporate websites, belonging to such organisations as large companies, universities, and banks. Websites and AWPs of smaller, less formal organisations, such as small businesses, haven’t received much attention from genre analysts. This study consists in the genre analysis of the AWPs of one such recent and burgeoning category of small business: third wave coffee shops. A genre analysis based on Bhatia’s analysing unfamiliar genres framework and Biber’s top-down genre analysis was conducted on a sample corpus of AWPs of 24 third wave coffee shops in Türkiye. It was found that AWPs of third wave coffee shops constitute a genre, whose communicative purposes are (i) promoting the business, and (ii) qualifying the business as a third wave coffee shop, and whose rhetorical structure consists of seven rhetorical moves and four structural elements. Only one of these moves is mandatory, and only one other move can be classified as conventional. Three of these moves have clear positional tendencies, while the other four do not display an identifiable sequential order. The genre exhibits a preference for complex sentences, first person plural pronouns and verbs, and the present tense. In the case of one move, time and place adverbials are used as a semiotic resource for self-promotion. Ultimately, the findings of this study show that AWPs of Turkish third wave coffee shops constitute a flexible promotional genre shaped around the values and socioeconomics of these third wave coffee shops.