Worlds of Written Discourse

A Genre-Based View

Vijay Bhatia

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781472521712
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The tension between the real world of written discourse and its representation in applied genre-based literature is the main theme of this book. The book addresses this theme from the perspectives of four rather different worlds: the world of reality, the world of private intentions, the world of analysis and the world of applications. Using examples from a range of situations including advertising, business, academia, economics, law, book introductions, reports, media and fundraising, Bhatia uses discourse analysis to move genre theory away from educational contexts and into the real world.

PART ONE

Overview

1

Perspectives on written discourse

I am using the term discourse in a general sense to refer to language use in institutional, professional or more general social contexts. It includes both the written as well as the spoken forms, though I will be mainly concerned with written discourse in this book. Discourse analysis refers to the study of naturally occurring written discourse focusing in particular on its analysis beyond the sentence level. As a general term, discourse analysis therefore can focus on lexico-grammatical and other textual properties, on regularities of organization of language use, on situated language use in institutional, professional or organizational contexts, or on language use in a variety of broadly configured social contexts, often highlighting social relations and identities, power asymmetry and social struggle.

1.1 History and development

In this opening chapter, I would like to give some indication of the way analysis of written discourse has developed in the last few decades. There are a number of ways one can see the historical development of this field. Viewing primarily in terms of different perspectives on the analysis of written discourse in academic, professional and other institutionalized contexts, one can identify a number of rather distinct traditions in the analysis of written discourse, some of which may be recognized as discourse as text, discourse as genre, discourse as professional practice and discourse as social practice. On the other hand, it is also possible to view the chronological development of the field in terms of three main phases, each one highlighting at least one major concern in the analysis of written discourse. The first phase can be seen as focusing on the textualization of lexico-grammatical resources and the second one on the regularities of organization, with the final one highlighting contextualization of discourse.

There is some value attached to both the views, and therefore I would like to highlight some aspects of the field based on the chronological development first, and then make an attempt to integrate them into a coherent argument for treating the field of written discourse analysis as a gradual development in the direction of a number of specific perspectives on the analysis of written discourse. The chapter therefore represents historical development of the field on the one hand, and increasingly thicker descriptions of language use on the other.

The three phases that I have referred to above in the historical development of analysis of written discourse thus are:

•Textualization of lexico-grammar

•Organization of discourse

•Contextualization of discourse

In discussing these three rather distinct phases in the development of analysis of written discourse, I would like to further distinguish them in terms of various stages, some of which will show occasional overlaps; however, the purpose of the discussion is to highlight the nature of the development of the field, and more importantly the influence of relevant insights from disciplines other than descriptive linguistics, which was the main influence in the early descriptions of language use. Let me discuss some of the important aspects of what I have referred to as the chronological development of the field.

Textualization of lexico-grammar

The analyses of language use in early days, especially in the 1960s and the early 1970s, were overly influenced by frameworks in formal linguistics, and hence remained increasingly confined to surface-level features of language. These analyses were also influenced by variation studies due to the interest of many linguists in applied linguistics and language teaching (Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens 1964). Without getting into a detailed history of language variation and description, I would like to highlight some of the important stages of such a gradual development.

As part of the study of language variation as ‘register’ (Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens 1964), the early analyses of written discourse focused on statistically significant features of lexico-grammar used in a particular subset of texts associated with a particular discipline. Barber (1962) was probably one of the earliest studies identifying significant grammatical features in a corpus of scientific texts. Computational analytical procedures were not developed at that time, and hence the analytical findings were confined to only some of the significant features rather than a complete analysis of the corpus as such. Similarly, Gustaffsson (1975) focused on only one syntactic feature of legal discourse, i.e. binomials and multinomials. In a similar manner Spencer (1975) identified yet another typical feature of legal discourse, noun–verb combinations. The trend continued with Bhatia and Swales (1983) who identified nominalizations in legislative discourse as their object of study. In all these preliminary attempts, one may notice two concerns: an effort to focus on the surface level of specialized texts, and an interest in the description of functional variation in discourse by focusing on statistically significant features of lexis and grammar. Both these concerns seemed to serve well the cause of applied linguistics for language teaching, especially the teaching and learning of (ESP). There was very little attention paid to any significant comparisons of different varieties, perhaps because of the focus on ESP, which often concerned a well-defined group of learners from a specific discipline.

Some of the early analyses of lexico-grammar in specialized texts used in language teaching and learning gave an incentive to investigations of functional values that features of lexico-grammar in specialized texts represent, though often within clause boundaries without much reference to discourse organization. Functional characterization of lexico-grammar or textualization in terms of discoursal values within the rhetoric of scientific discourse was investigated in Selinker, Lackstrom and Trimble (1973). During this phase there was a clear emphasis on the characterization of functional values that features of lexico-grammar take in written discourse. Swales (1974) investigated the function of en – participles in chemistry texts; Oster (1981) focused on patterns of tense usage in reporting past literature in scientific discourse; and Dubois (1982) analysed the discoursal values assigned to noun phrases in biomedical journal articles. Swales (1974) documents one of the most insightful analyses of functional values of ‘bare’ attributive en-participles in single-noun NPs, both in the pre- and post-modifying positions, in a corpus of chemistry textbooks. He assigns two kinds of functional values to pre-posed uses of given, that of clarification of the ‘status’ of the sentence or that of exemplification by the author. The following text (Swales 1974: 18) contains the use of an en-participle for clarification:

A given bottle contains a compound which upon analysis is shown to contain 0.600 gram-atom of phosphorous and 1.500 gram-atom of oxygen.

He explains that the function of given is to prevent unnecessary and irrelevant enquiries of the following kind:

•Is this a typical experiment?

•Who did the experiment?

•How large was the bottle?

Since attribution is an important convention in science, the role of given here is to signal unmistakably that the convention is being suspended. On the other hand, given in the following sentence is used as a crypto-determiner to assign a very specific meaning to the noun:

Figure 9.5 shows how the vapour pressure of a given substance changes with temperature.

(Swales 1974)

Swales (1974: 19) rightly claims that any of the ordinary language substitutions for a given, such as a certain or a particular, in a case like this will make the reading ‘insufficiently generalized’, whereas a substitution such as any or every will lead to over-generalization. This leads Swales to conclude that this particular en-participle performs a very specific rhetorical function, which is unique to scientific discourse.

It is possible to extend such a study of textualization of lexico-grammatical features to other genres, often comparing their use across different genres. In an earlier study (Bhatia 1991), while investigating the use of nominals in professional genres such as advertisements, scientific research reports and legislative provisions, I discovered that although nominals were used overwhelmingly in all these genres, they were markedly different not only in their syntactic form, but also in their rhetorical function. In advertising, nominals typically take the form (Modifier) Head (Qualifier), where modifiers are realized primarily in terms of a series of linearly arranged attributes as follows:

(Determiner) (Adjective) (Adjective) (Adjective) . . . Head (Qualifier)

Since one of the main concerns in advertising is to offer a positive evaluation of products or services being promoted, and nominals, in particular noun phrases, are seen as carriers of adjectives, we are likely to find an above-average incidence of nominals in such genres. The following is a typical example of this:

The world’s smallest and lightest digital camcorder

that’s also a digital still camera

On the other hand, nominals in academic research genres, especially in the sciences, are used to create and develop technical concepts. These nominals take the form of nominal compounds that have the following structure:

(Modifier) (Modifier) (Modifier) . . . Head (Qualifier)

where modifiers are typically realized in terms of a series of linearly arranged nouns functioning as classifiers and occasionally incorporating an adjective. The following is a typical example of this phenomenon (Bhatia 1993: 149):

Nozzle gas ejection space ship attitude control

In the case of legislative discourse, nominals are typically realized in the form of nominalizations as these syntactic forms allow draftsmen to condense clauses for subsequent references in the same sentence, adding precision and unambiguity to legislative provisions (Bhatia 1982, 1993). The following is a typical example of such a process of nominalizations (underlined):

If the debtor fails without reasonable cause to attend on the Official Receiver as aforesaid or to furnish him with such information as aforesaid, or if the debtor obstructs the search of the premises or the production of any book or document required in connection therewith, or authorizes or permits any such obstruction, the debtor shall be liable on summary conviction to imprisonment for any term not exceeding 6 months, and every person who takes any part in any such obstruction, whether authorized or permitted by the debtor or not, shall be liable to the like penalty.

(Section 8.3 of the Bankruptcy Ordinance 1997, HKSAR)

Almost at the same time one could see attempts towards a conceptualization of text and discourse through semantics and pragmatics by van Dijk (1977, 1985), Beaugrande and Dressler (1981), Brown and Yule (1983) and several others who focused on developing a relationship between the choice of lexico-grammar and specific forms of discourse organization that can be viewed as an extension of linguistic description. Although the terms used were text and discourse organization, the emphasis clearly was on cohesion and coherence, macro-structures and information structures of discourse. Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) and van Dijk (1985) relied more on linguistics and psycholinguistics to focus on what became popular as text-linguistics, which was developed as a reaction to the study of ideal language within sentence boundaries in much of descriptive linguistics. It was an attempt to focus on authentic texts seen as instances of language use in real contexts. Text-linguistics marked an interesting departure from descriptive linguistics in t...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General editor’s preface
• Introduction
• PART ONE Overview
• PART TWO The world of reality
• PART THREE The world of private intentions
• PART FOUR The world of analytical perspectives
• PART FIVE The world of applications
• References
• Index
• Copyright