functional systemic linguistics; genre analysis; FAQs; university website presentation; field-dominated discourse; tenor-dominated-discourse

Drawing upon the Hallidayan functional approach to language and upon the methodology of current genre analysis, the paper focuses on the relatively newly established web genre of Frequently Asked Questions. The study traces the position and the function of the genre within the genre colony of university website presentations and attempts at defining its core generic qualities. The genre of FAQs tends to be shaped by the interplay of conventional and variable features with the conventionality stemming primarily from the genre recurrent pattern and the regular use of its name, and with the inner variability captured by four tentative scales spanning between interactivity and monologic character, continuity and discontinuity, script-like organization and a random collection, and between the field-dominated and tenor-dominated genre profile.