O gatunkowym maskowaniu — na przykładzie tekstów urzędowych funkcjonujących w komunikacji kościelnej w czasie pandemii koronawirusa

Abstract

The starting point of the article is observation of a phenomenon that the author calls the masking of genres, which consists in formal unification of official texts used in church communication during the pandemic. In the first part of the article the conditioning of the said processes is presented, including the status of the Church, the need to react to official secular documents, communication roles of senders of letters edited in dioecese chanceries in the crisis situation, and the arbitral assignment of a set of intentions to particular texts. The next part includes a draft characteristics of generic exponents of utterances that used to function in the church communication as decrees, instructions and communications, and were to regulate the conduct of clergy and lay believers in the pandemic times. The essence of the article is a hypothesis about a creation of new genres of speech, used in the said communication as fully shaped generic entities, yet deprived of genre names consistently assigned to them. They are texts unified in formal and stylistic terms. The differentiating features of such genres include only selected elements of the pragmatic aspect of the genre pattern. Therefore, the author calls them official letters in the function of decrees, instructions or communications.