The changing styles of the moving genres (the case of the Ten Commandments and the Highway Code)

Abstract

This article discusses intriguing text realizations of the genres of Ten Commandments and the Highway Code as texts that reached beyond their primary stylistic and discursive setting. In the former case, the text departed from its original religious contextualization to move towards a lay context, also acquiring a ludic aspect. In the latter, the Code moved from the domain of administrative law to be incorporated within the religious framework of references. These two cases illustrate the phenomenon of the stylistic migration of text genres, which – as observed by the author – results from the contemporary openness of stylistic registers other than the literary ones. The case of the Decalogue illustrates changes of accentuation (salience) in a particular text genre, which results from the modification of its communicative functions in a particular text realization of the genre (e.g. irony or parody).

The case of the Highway Code illustrates the phenomenon of either expanding or fuzzy boundaries of the religious style – undergoing diverse attempts to make it more attractive to contemporary audiences, particularly in its catechetic variant. These attempts often rely on building genre similarities and comparisons.