Clara laughed and wrote their conversation down.
This is the most studied. Adam breaks narrative down into a series of actions oriented by a plot. He famously reworks Labov’s model into a more flexible structure:
In the landscape of French Discourse Analysis and linguistics, Jean-Michel Adam’s 1992 work, Les Textes : Types et Prototypes , stands as a pivotal shift in how we understand written and oral production. Moving away from rigid, taxonomic approaches that sought to categorize texts into airtight boxes, Adam proposed a dynamic framework grounded in the theory of prototypes. This approach acknowledges a fundamental truth of communication: texts are rarely "pure." Instead, they are complex structures where various communicative intentions collide. Jean Michel Adam Les Textes Types Et Prototypes.pdf
: Designed to clarify a "why" or "how," often moving from a problem to a solution (e.g., scientific or educational texts).
The book's central premise is a critique of traditional text typologies. Adam observes that texts are so diverse and complex that a definitive classification is impossible, beyond illusory pedagogical simplifications. With the linguist Charolles, Adam agrees that "the typology of texts is a particularly delicate domain," and he decides to abandon it. Clara laughed and wrote their conversation down
Jean-Michel Adam’s "Les Textes: Types et Prototypes" proposes that texts are complex, heterogeneous compositions formed by combining five fundamental, prototypical sequences: narrative, descriptive, argumentative, expository, and dialogic. Moving away from rigid classification, Adam’s framework emphasizes identifying dominant sequences within a text's overall structure rather than labeling it as a single, pure type.
This shift from to prototypical sequence is the book's theoretical cornerstone. A prototype is not a rigid ideal but a flexible reference model, offering a "flexibility of the prototype" in place of the "absolute distinctiveness of the type". He famously reworks Labov’s model into a more
In linguistics, text types refer to the classification of texts based on their structural, functional, and communicative characteristics. Prototypes, on the other hand, are representative examples or models that embody the typical features of a particular text type. Adam's work on text types and prototypes seeks to establish a systematic framework for understanding the diversity of texts and their underlying structures.