Oct 16
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
EDITOR: John Flowerdew
EDITOR: Li Wei
TITLE: Discourse in Context: Contemporary Applied Linguistics Volume 3
SERIES TITLE: Contemporary Applied Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2013
REVIEWER: Michael Kranert, University College London
Review’s Editors: Malgorzata Cavar and Sara Couture
SUMMARY
‘Discourse in Context’ is not just a new collection of papers on language use
in different institutional contexts, but is, as the editor John Flowerdew
rightly claims (p. 2), the first collection specifically on the
discourse-context relation covering a broad variety of approaches to
discourse. The 15 chapters of this volume demonstrate the diversity of
approaches to both types of discourse — ‘little “d” discourse’ as language
use in context and ‘big “D” discourses’ (Gee 2005) as systems of knowledge and
belief. Each individual contribution represents an analytical approach to
D/discourse such as conversation analysis or critical discourse analysis
applied to a specific context, and all contributions discuss the text-context
relation on the basis of their approach to context.
In chapter 1, John Flowerdew introduces the reader to the problems of the
discourse-context relation and presents a concise overview of approaches to
it, introducing the most important lines of thought from Gricean Pragmatics
(e.g. Grice 1989, Sperber and Wilson 2001) to Systemic Functional Linguistics
(e.g. Halliday and Hasan 1985), outlining criticisms of them and referring to
the relevant literature.
In the second chapter, ‘Considering context when analysing representations of
gender and sexuality: A case study’, Paul Baker undertakes a close reading of
a DAILY MAIL article to demonstrate the features of sexual identity discourse
in the British media. He chose an article from 16 October 2009, entitled ‘Why
there was nothing “natural” about Stephen Gately’s death’, since this article
instigated ‘the highest number of complaints to the Press Complaints
Commission (over 25,000) ever recorded’ (p. 30). His close reading from a
feminist poststructuralist perspective employs elements of Fairclough’s
Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1989) and Wodak’s Discourse Historical
Approach (e.g. Reisigl and Wodak 2009) and uses a broad range of secondary
data such as other DAILY MAIL articles and online comments to analyse the
reception of the article in question. He also introduces the reader to the
corpus linguistic concept of discourse prosody (Stubbs 2001), in order to
verify his interpretation of certain linguistic features. Both the secondary
sources and the corpora are analysed as contexts of the DAILY MAIL article and
used to explain the language use of its author.
The third chapter is also based on a corpus-assisted approach to discourse.
Monika Bednarek’s ”’Who are you and why are you following us?” Wh-questions
and communicative context in television dialogue’ presents an analysis of
Wh-questions in 27 contemporary US television series. Bednarek argues for the
importance of the genre ‘television dialogue’, because with a global audience,
US television series have a significant influence on speakers of English as a
second language. This genre is particularly interesting because of its
particular text-context relation, i.e. the necessary ‘overhearer design’
(Bubel 2008) of scripted TV dialogue as a result of lines being addressed to
characters and to the audience at the same time. The dialogue is therefore
designed to tell a story for the audience as overhearers who can listen to the
dialogue, but can not take part in the interaction. This results in specific
linguistic structures Bednarek analyses, such as wh-questions that do not
appear in the same way in natural dialogue. Bednarek’s concordance and n-gram
analysis lead her to develop interesting hypotheses for further research on
this genre such as ‘why-, how- and what-questions function to create
involvement between characters whereas who- and where-questions are used for
plot development’ (p. 66).
In chapter 4, ’Discourse and discord in court: The role of context in the
construction of witness examination in British criminal trial talk’, Janet
Cotterill asks how the context of the British trial-by-jury system and its
ancient archaic rules and protocols influence the way barristers question
witnesses. The analysis pictures the courtroom as a context with asymmetrical
power relations between the professionals (who ask the questions), the
witnesses (who have to answer), and the jury as sanctioned overhearers who
have to judge the case without being able to play an active role in the
communication. In a selection of official trial transcripts, the witness
examination by lawyers is analysed using a hybrid methodology of Critical
Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1989) and corpus linguistics, demonstrating,
how the barristers’ questions to witnesses are designed as a ‘display
exercise’ (p. 87) for the jury, telling the story from the prosecuting or
defending perspective.
Britt-Louise Gunnarson approaches ‘Business discourse in the globalized
economy’ (chapter 5) by employing a combination of sociolinguistic,
sociological and text linguistic methods. She construes context as a
multilevel model of contextual influences on language, capturing the social
context in a technical-economic, socio-cultural and a legal political
framework. The business discourse itself is contextualised on the local,
national and supranational level. In her paper, the author presents an
analysis of staff policy documents uncovering the narrative structures of the
genre as well as the different voices represented in the career stories told
in these policy documents.
Michael Handford’s Chapter 6, ‘Context in spoken professional discourse:
Language and practice in an international bridge design meeting’, focuses on
the ‘professional meeting’ genre, using a corpus-assisted analysis. The
context is captured with ethnographic methods which enable the author – who
witnessed the event personally and interviewed participants – to verify his
textual insights into the discourse. The detailed analysis of the material and
a comparison to other corpora of professional discourse show considerable
differences between business meetings in general and this engineering meeting
in particular. A further, broader analysis however will be necessary to
demonstrate, if these results can be generalised.
Chapter 7, ‘Ethnicities without guarantees: An empirically situated approach’,
puts ethnographic methods also employed in chapter 6 centre stage. In their
project ‘Urban Classroom Culture and Interaction’, Roxy Harris and Ben Rampton
have undertaken a large data collection following 5 girls and 4 boys aged
13-14 in a London secondary school for two years, using participant
observation, interviews, and producing 180 hours of radio microphone recording
and playback interviews on the recorded data. The authors offer a detailed
analysis of one episode involving an ethnically mixed group of girls. In this
episode, ethnicity is part of the exchange. Contextualising the data in the
transcript with ethnographic data, Harris and Rampton demonstrate that
ethnicity in this example is ‘a resource that the girls exploited quite
skilfully in pursuit of their really pressing interests’, i.e. prospective
boy-girl relations (p. 153).
In ‘Constructing contexts through grammar: Cognitive models and
conceptualization in British newspaper reports of political protests’,
Christopher Hart analyses the media coverage of the UK student protests
against rising tuition fees in 2010. He successfully translates the
socio-cognitive approach to critical discourse analysis (van Dijk 2008) into a
cognitive linguistic approach based on Langacker’s Cognitive Grammar
(Langacker 2008). This approach allows him to capture the construal of
demonstrator and police violence in the student protests in online press
reports. Unveiling the grammatical patterns used, Hart can demonstrate
convincingly, that the Guardian was the only newspaper in the sample that drew
attention to police violence, while the other newspaper articles construe the
hegemonic picture of legitimate police action using strategies of structural
configuration and identification.
Chapters 9 and 10 of the edited volume under review aim to change our idea of
the text context relation. Rick Iedema and Katherine Carroll present a method
of reflexive ethnographic intervention into health care communication. In
their study ‘Intervening in health care communication using discourse
analysis’, they define context as ‘that which is entirely excluded from
people’s attention’ (p. 186) and use video feedback in order to produce an
environment in which practitioners can distance themselves from their
naturalized practices such as infection control or ward rounds. This allows
professionals and analysts together to learn about physical habits or
communicative processes that are normally invisible to both. To demonstrate
how this learning takes place, the authors recorded and analysed the
conversations in video feedback sessions. Iedema’s and Carroll’s paper widens
the discussion from the material at hand to discourse theory in general and
the necessity to reflexive practice here, for example to question ‘the
existing boundaries between discourse analysis and social practice’ in order
to understand discourse as ‘a dynamic at the heart of complexity’ (p. 200).
In Chapter 10, ‘Locating the power of place in space: A geosemiotic approach
to context’, Jackie Jia Lou focuses on an advertising campaign to legitimize
gentrification of Chinatown in Washington DC in order to demonstrate the
semiotic potential of advertising boards because of their location in certain
neighbourhoods or in proximity to certain corporations. She fruitfully
combines classical discourse analytical tools such as systemic functional
linguistics with a new approach to context. This approach, based on Scollon
and Scollon (2003), combines an analysis of the interaction order and the
visual semiotics with the semiotics of a place and allows to capture, how the
text of the advertising boards is semiotically linked to its specific
location, for example outside the metro station in Chinatown.
Anna Maurannen’s chapter ‘Lingua franca discourse in academic contexts: Shaped
by complexity’ takes readers into what will be for many a familiar
environment: academia, in the form of a multilingual environment with English
as the lingua franca (ELF). Analysing data from the ELFA Corpus (English as a
Lingua Franca on Academic Settings), which consists of spoken, dialogical,
authentic, non-EFL-learning events such as academic seminars and conference
discussions, Maurannen shows that collaboration is salient in ELF, as all
speakers are aware that a non-native language is being used and that therefore
problems can occur. Her study also shows that, in this context, academic
hierarchy overrides language expertise when linguistic corrections are made;
it is not necessarily the English native speakers but rather the senior
academics who provide help in the use of English.
In Chapter 12, ‘A multimodal approach to discourse, context and culture’, Kay
L. O’Halloran, Sabine Tan and Marissa K.L. E return to a multimodal
understanding of discourse that was already featured in chapters 9 and 10.
Here, discourse is understood as multimodal semiosis, and as embedded in
multimodal context. The focus is therefore on the context which is not
external to discourse. The authors aim to capture the embeddedness of online
business news in the multimodal context of the internet. Employing ‘Multimodal
Analysis Video Software’ developed by Kay O’Halloran, the authors provide the
reader with a detailed impression of this useful tool, considering the
restrictions of a research article. Analysing videographic representations of
different actors in business news such as Certified Expert, Newsmaker and
Presenter, the authors demonstrate how events and social actors are
re-contextualised depending on the news networks distinctive communicative
practices.
Chapters 13 and 14 focus on language learning in different contexts. In
‘Intervening in contexts of schooling’, David Rose and J.R. Martin review the
effects of the genre-based literacy pedagogy they developed as a practical
application of the Sydney school of Systemic Functional Linguistics. The
authors summarize succinctly the Sydney school research into school genres
such as stories, reports or critical responses, and interpret Bernstein’s
theory of pedagogic contexts (Bernstein 1996) on this background. They argue
that teachers themselves do not reflect the structures and intentions of
genres used in school. Pupils therefore only acquire this knowledge
implicitly, rather than through conscious engagement with the language of high
quality examples. This creates and perpetuates inequalities in education,
since the pupils’ lack of knowledge is wrongly individualized when failure is
attributed to innate abilities. Therefore, they suggest a program of
genre-based literacy that teaches pupils to deconstruct genres in reading high
level curriculum texts. In a multi staged programmes, the learners will then
be guided to practice these genres in joint and individual writing and
rewriting of texts. A broad analysis of data from 100 randomly selected
classes shows the incredible impact of this teaching method on all low-,
middle- and high-achieving students in different school years compared to
students without read-to-learn instruction. The article provides impressive
examples of students’ work to illustrate the success of the method and
persuade the reader.
Hansun Zhang Waring’s ‘Turn-allocation and context: Broadening participation
in the second language classroom’ employs Conversation Analysis to understand
turn-taking in English as a second language class. She argues for a theory of
context that distinguishes sequential context (in other words: co-text), and
institutional context. In the sequential context, one action shapes the
understanding of the next and constrains possible following actions. The
institutional context is normally internalized and recognized as relevant by
the participants. Although her discussion on the theoretical understanding of
context in Conversation Analysis and its application to classroom discourse is
enlightening, the results of her analysis are not surprising to experienced
teachers: teachers broaden learner participation in a plenary situation by
either bypassing the first respondent or selecting an alternative category of
speakers.
In the final article of the volume, ‘Political discourse analysis –
Distinguishing frontstage and backstage contexts. A discourse-historical
approach’, Ruth Wodak presents some results from her fieldwork on ‘Doing
Politics’ in the European Parliament, also published in Wodak (2011). Her
analysis in this paper focuses on three short episodes from a working day of
an MEP (Member of the European Parliament) she calls Hans. Her close reading
of the transcripts shows the different registers Hans has to manage
‘frontstage’ (i.e. aimed at the public) and ‘backstage’(i.e. in internal
negotiations of policies). Her discussion of the results also shows the
importance of ethnographic data for the interpretation of discursive events,
which has already been pointed out for other contexts in Chapters 6 (‘spoken
professional discourse’) and 7 (‘ethnicity in urban classroom culture’).
Politicians form a community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991) like other
professionals, and only with the support of ethnographic methods can an
external analyst interpret and understand their linguistic strategies.
EVALUATION
The volume under review aims to ‘bring […] together researchers from
different approaches, but all with the commitment to the study of language in
context’. By choosing a broad variety of approaches, the editor John Flowerdew
invites the reader to ‘compare and contrast these different approaches and the
application of their particular models of content’ (p. 1).
Many students and early career researcher share the challenge in trying to
find a methodologically broad overview of their field that is a good read and
at the same time gives a detailed insight into the analysis of linguistic
material. Introductions are often either written from only one theoretical
point of view, are theory-heavy, or do not present a variety of primary
material. In this respect, ‘Discourse in Context’ is a very welcome and
thought-provoking read, hopefully not only to established researchers
interested in the newest currents in the field, but also to beginners at the
postgraduate level or even motivated readers at undergraduate level. Thus, it
is truly regrettable that such an interesting collection of papers carries
such a heavy price tag of $190, because it will exclude precisely this
audience from gaining access to a publication they would profit from most.
All chapters are well-written and introduce their approach to language in
context in the clearest possible way. The contributions follow a similar
textual pattern, giving the reader a transparent insight into their methods
and goals, and allowing the comparative reading the editor intended. While
keeping their theoretical introductions succinct in favour of detailed
analyses of their primary materials, the overview over the academic literature
in the field is comprehensive and useful. Almost all authors use helpful
graphic representations for presenting their results; however, the gray scale
reproductions are not always well printed and are sometimes difficult to read;
Chapters 10 and 12 are a particular example of this.
Although not all findings of the research ‘Discourse in Context’ are
surprising as pointed out in the summary earlier, all papers deliver a
hands-on introduction into the methods of textual analysis and
contextualisation, and allow the reader to evaluate the merits of them. The
connections between the different chapters, however, could have been made
clearer by structuring the volume into sections, each with their own
introductions. For example, the structure could have focussed on research
methods: Chapters 2-4, 6 and 11, for example, use corpus linguistic
methodology in different ways, while Chapters 10 and 12 focus on
multimodality. Alternatively, or even in combination with a methodological
structure, papers with similar fields such as language learning (Chapters 11,
13 and 14), or professional discourses (Chapters 5, 6, 9 and 15) could have
been placed in themed sections. Separate introductions to such sections, which
would put the different approaches into context, would have made a volume
that succeeds in combining breadth and clarity an even better read.
REFERENCES
Bernstein, Basil B. 1996. “Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory,
research, critique” (London: Taylor & Francis), Critical perspectives on
literacy and education
Bubel, Claudia M. 2008. ‘Film audiences as overhearers’, “Journal of
pragmatics”, 40.1: 55-71
Fairclough, Norman. 1989. “Language and power” (Harlow: Longman), Language in
social life series
Gee, James P. 2005. “An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method,
2nd edn” (New York, Abingdon: Routledge)
Grice, H. P. 1989. “Logic and Conversation.” In Studies in the way of words,
22–40. Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press.
Langacker, Ronald W. 2008. “Cognitive grammar: A basic introduction” (Oxford:
Oxford University Press)
Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. “Situated learning: Legitimate
peripheral participation / Jean Lave, Etienne Wenger” (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), Learning in doing social, cognitive, and computational
perspectives
Halliday, Michael A. K., and Ruqaiya Hasan. 1985. Language, context, and text:
Aspects of language in a social-semiotic perspective. Language education.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Reisigl, Martin, and Ruth Wodak. 2009. ‘The discourse-historical approach’, in
“Methods of critical discourse analysis”, ed. by Ruth Wodak and Michael Meyer,
2nd edn (Los Angeles [u.a.]: SAGE), pp. 87–121
Scollon, Ronald, and Suzanne B. K. Scollon. 2003. “Discourses in place:
Language in the material world” (London: Routledge)
Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 2001. Relevance: Communication and
cognition. 2nd ed. Oxford, Cambridge MA: Blackwell Publishers.
Stubbs, Michael. 2001. “Words and phrases: Corpus studies of lexical semantics
/ Michael Stubbs” (Oxford ; Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers)
van Dijk, Teun A. 2008. “Discourse and context: A sociocognitive approach”
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)
Wodak, Ruth. 2011. “The discourse of politics in action: Politics as usual”
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan)
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Michael Kranert works in the field of political linguistics, applying
linguistic research methods such as Systemic Functional Linguistics and
Critical Metaphor Analysis to political discourses. His Ph.D. project at UCL
London aims to undertake a comparison of the discourses of New Labour and the
German SPD at the turn of the twenty-first century, explaining linguistic and
discursive differences with reference to differences in the political cultures
of Germany and the UK.
Sep 30
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
EDITOR: Ken Hyland
EDITOR: Brian Paltridge
TITLE: The Bloomsbury Companion to Discourse Analysis
SERIES TITLE: Bloomsbury Companions
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2013
REVIEWER: Inas Youssef Mahfouz, American University of Kuwait
SUMMARY
This book belongs to the Bloomsbury Companions series. It is a panoptic
textbook that provides an overview of discourse analysis. The book consists of
an introduction by the editors and two equal parts. “Part I: Methods of
Analysis in Discourse Research” comprises nine chapters covering the main
theoretical approaches and issues involved in discourse analysis. “Part II:
Research Areas and New Directions in Discourse Research” comprises twelve
chapters that cover different practical directions in discourse analysis.
The book begins with a short introduction where the editors define discourse
as ”an overloaded term, covering a wide range of meanings” (1) and discuss
how discourse analysis has developed quickly over the past decades. Finally,
they describe the subsequent chapters of the book and their purposes.
The first chapter, ”Data collection and transcription in discourse analysis”
by Rodney H. Jones, focuses on the collection and transcription of data from
spoken interactions. Data collection and transcription are regarded as
cultural practices that have changed over the years as a result of the
development of several tools such as tape recorders, video cameras and
computers. The chapter ends with an emphasis on observing ethical issues of
data collection and transcription.
Data collection is typically followed by analysis and this is the topic of
Chapter two, ”Conversation Analysis”. In this chapter Sue Wilkinson and
Celia Kitzinger explore the six features of conversation or
talk-in-interaction, namely: “turn-taking, action formation, sequence
organization, repair, word selection and the overall structural organization
of talk” (p. 25). Then the chapter concentrates on turn-taking systems to
illustrate that regardless of the accumulated research on conversation
analysis, much investigation is still needed.
In Chapter three, ”Critical discourse analysis”, Ruth Wodak traces the
development of the different approaches to critical discourse analysis (CDA)
and their similarities and differences. Wodak ends the chapter pinpointing the
cornerstones of CDA, namely its reliance on diverse techniques, use of
existing data, and emphasis on applying linguistic expertise to solving
problems.
In ”Genre Analysis”, Chapter four, Christine M. Tardy investigates theory
and research in genre analysis. Tardy focuses on grant proposals and analyzes
20 successful proposals to shed light on how rhetorical and linguistic choices
impact a text.
Mike Baynham elaborates on different approaches pertaining to analyzing
narratives in Chapter five, “Narrative Analysis”. Baynham discusses three
approaches to narrative: discourse analysis, conversational analysis, and
linguistic ethnographic approaches. The chapter also provides two case studies
of narrative analysis and ends with some suggestions for future research.
In Chapter six, ”Ethnography and Discourse Analysis”, Dwight Atkinson,
Hanako Okada and Steven Talmy investigate the complementarity between
ethnographic research and discourse analysis. They show how ethnographic
studies have been enriched with the addition of linguistic detail and vice
versa.
In Chapter seven, ”Systemic Functional Linguistics,” J.R. Martin surveys SFL
and its development in Britain and Australia over the past six decades. The
chapter provides a sample study of a magazine extract and pinpoints new
directions to using SFL in discourse analysis at the end.
Chapter eight, ”Multimodal Discourse Analysis”, by Kay L. O’Halloran,
explores multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) as an evolving approach to
discourse analysis. MDA “extends the study of language per se to the study of
language in combination with other resources, such as images, scientific
symbolism, gesture, action, music and sound” (p.120). The chapter discusses
different approaches to MDA, theoretical and practical issues involved, and a
sample MDA text analysis.
The first part ends with a chapter on “Corpus Approaches to the Analysis of
Discourse.” In this chapter, Bethany Gray and Douglas Biber preview the use of
corpora to analyze language. The authors end their chapter with an emphasis on
the new insights about language that corpus-based analysis can bring.
Part II, ”Research Areas and New Directions in Discourse Research,” provides
practical illustration which complements the theoretical foundation provided
in Part I. This part includes 12 chapters about a wide variety of issues.
The first chapter in this part, Chapter ten, examines types of spoken
discourse and their features. The author, Joan Cutting, pinpoints how certain
social variables such as gender and social class can influence the selection
of features for analysis.
In Chapter 11, Ken Hyland probes into the nature of “Academic Discourse,” its
importance, methods of analyzing it, and the amount of information available
about this type of discourse. The chapter ends with a sample study on
citations to illustrate the ways in which academics interact with their
students and how this interaction is grounded on the repertoires of their
disciplines.
Janet Holmes investigates “Discourse in the Workplace” in Chapter 12. The
chapter focuses on spoken workplace discourse; the author begins by discussing
current research in three categories: types, power and solidarity, and gender
and ethnicity. Holmes provides a sample study, which focuses on a senior
manager who enacts leadership to his team and constantly provides directions
while maintaining a consultative style. Holmes ends her chapter with some
pointers for future research.
”Discourse and Gender,” Chapter 13, examines the role of discourse in gender
and language research. Paul Baker skillfully sums up recent research and
analyzes the concept of the ”cougar” (”an emerging identity category used
to describe women who have younger male partners”). The chapter ends with
insights on using discourse to develop the field of language and gender.
Chapters 14, 15, and 16 focus on trends in discourse analysis studies that
appeared towards the end of the twentieth century. Chapter 14 investigates
“News Discourse,” whether written (as in newspapers) or spoken (as in
broadcasted interviews). Furthermore, the author, Martin Montgomery, sheds
some light on considerations of power and ideology in news discourse. In
Chapter 15, ”Discourse and Computer-Mediated Communication”, Julia Davies
tackles online discourse. The chapter adopts a multimodal approach to
analyzing online texts by examining their fabric, nature, and context. John
Olsson focuses on “the interface between language, crime and law, where ‘law’
includes law enforcement, judicial matters, legislation, … and even disputes
which only potentially involve some infraction of the law” (Olsson n.d.) in
chapter 16, ”Forensic Discourse Analysis: A work in progress”. The chapter
discusses the origins of forensic discourse analysis, its focus, and the
structure of forensic discourse. The chapter ends with a clear emphasis on the
cross disciplinary cooperation between linguists and those working in the
legal profession.
The remaining chapters in this part focus on discourse in a variety of
contexts. Tope Omoniyi investigates “Discourse and Identity” in Chapter 17.
The chapter discusses the definition of ‘minority’ and synthesizes current
research in this area. The author ends by emphasizing the impact of
globalization in creating new contextualizations of ‘minority’.
Chapter 18, ”Discourse and Race,” by Angel Lin and Ryuko Kubota, examines
the idea of race in discourse. The authors pinpoint key studies in this field
and provide some pointers for future research.
Jennifer Hammond investigates “Classroom Discourse” in Chapter 19. The author
sheds light on analyses of turns, sequences and meanings in classroom talk
along with the theoretical, methodological, practical issues and procedures
involved. She provides a sample study which describes pedagogical practices
used with ESL students in mainstream schools. The author ends her chapter with
some procedures for future research.
In chapter 20, ”Discourse and Intercultural Communication,” John Corbett
highlights the different approaches to researching intercultural
communication: questionnaires, group interviews and analyses of actual
interaction. The author concludes that all three approaches should be
interwoven together to reach accurate results.
The last chapter of the book, ”Medical Discourse,” by Timothy Halkowski,
investigates the different participants involved in medical discourse, i.e.
doctors, patients, nurses and the role played by each to unravel the how
‘illness-ing’, ‘patient-ing’, and ‘doctor-ing’ may affect interaction. The
chapter concludes with a note on expanding the scope of research on medical
discourse to include how medical teams manage their daily work.
EVALUATION
“The Bloomsbury Companion to Discourse Analysis” is a rich all-encompassing
textbook which succeeds in covering all concepts, movements, and approaches
related to discourse in one invaluable volume. The book includes two parts
with 21 chapters tackling discourse analysis from both theoretical and
practical perspectives. The different theoretical methods of doing discourse
analysis are presented in the first part of the book. The second part of the
book includes 12 chapters that provide practical analyses of the different
theoretical approaches to doing discourse analysis discussed in the first
part. The almost symmetrical structure of the two parts of the book reflects
the meticulous choices editors have made to put this volume in its current
state.
The internal organization of the chapters makes them easy to read and
understand. In part one, each chapter discusses a certain approach to
researching discourse, assumptions underlying it, and the instruments and
tools related to it. Each chapter ends with a short list of key readings for
those who want to expand their knowledge of the approach discussed. In the
second part, each chapter focuses on a key area in discourse analysis and
provides a sample analysis, pointers for future research, as well as a list of
key readings. The topics of the chapters in both parts of the book are varied,
ranging from traditional approaches to discourse analysis such as conversation
analysis, genre analysis, and narrative analysis to nascent approaches such as
multimodal discourse analysis and the analysis of computer-mediated
communication. The editors have also provided a glossary at the end which
gives brief definitions of most of the terms appearing in the book.
Overall, this volume is an invaluable reference for researchers interested in
discourse analysis. The chapters are not only carefully chosen and accurately
organized, but they are also written by experienced scholars. The content,
clarity, logical organization, and expert guidance provided in this volume
make it truly the best ‘companion’ to discourse analysts of all backgrounds.
References:
Olsson, J. (n.d.). ‘What is Forensic Linguistics?’ Retrieved August 25, 2014,
http://thetext.co.uk/docs/what_is.doc
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Inas Y. Mahfouz is an associate professor of Language and Linguistics at Ain
Shams University. Her primary research interests include discourse analysis,
computational linguistics and Systemic Functional Linguistics.
Jun 06
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
AUTHOR: Dániel Zoltan Kádár
TITLE: Relational Rituals and Communication
SUBTITLE: Ritual Interaction in Groups
PUBLISHER: Palgrave Macmillan
YEAR: 2013
REVIEWER: Sukriye Ruhi, Middle East Technical University
SUMMARY
‘Relational Rituals and Communication’ can be viewed as the full-blown
product of Kádár’s longstanding interest in linguistic rituals and
ritualization (e.g., Kádár, 2007). The monograph is theoretical in orientation
and argues for a discursive and relational approach to researching
constructive and destructive rituals in interpersonal communication. It
illustrates the approach with data drawn from both written and spoken language
in a variety of social contexts and languages. Drawing on insights and
concepts from various fields such as anthropology, cultural history,
(im)politeness, and psychology, the book offers an innovative perspective on
how people (re-)create their interpersonal relationships through ritual acts.
With this work, Kádár aims to
– offer a discursive, relational perspective on the ritual aspects of
communication, particularly in the context of in-group social networks,
– examine how ritual relational practices shape discourse and our relations
with people,
– show that rituals and ritualization are wider in scope in interpersonal
communication, both in terms of the ‘unit’ of the ritual act and in terms of
the social contexts in which rituals are performed.
Chapter One opens with the book’s motivation, and presents preliminaries for
its relational and discursive approach to rituals and rituality in language
use and interaction. It highlights the book’s scope as a study on relational
rituals primarily in in-group social networks, and situates the relational
approach against the background of traditional approaches to rituals such as
in the foundational work of Durkheim (1912/1995). Contrary to the idea that
interaction in contemporary Western societies is characterized by
deritualisation (e.g., Burke, 2005), Kádár argues that rituality in language
use is very much a part of both Western and Eastern societies, albeit in
different forms. The author defines and describes the characteristics of
relational ritual in the following manner: “Relational ritual is a
formalised/schematic, conventionalized and recurrent act, which is
relationship forcing, i.e. by operating it reinforces/transforms in-group
relationships. “Ritual is realized as an embedded (mini-)performance
(mimesis), and this performance is bound to relational history (and related
ethos), or historicity in general (and related social ethos). Ritual is an
emotively invested affective action, as anthropological research has shown”
(pp. 11-12).
Chapter One continues with a discussion of the data and the data analytic
methodology employed in the study. Kádár underscores that the discursive
approach necessitates the analysis of “longer stretches of interaction” (p.
14), to observe how rituals are deployed in interaction. The discursive
methodology is complemented by a look at the data from both participant and
theoretical perspectives. In line with this approach, the author utilizes data
from diverse languages (English, Hungarian and Chinese), comprising
conversations with his family and friends, “post-event interviews” (p. 18),
computer-mediated communication, historical epistolary discourse, and literary
works.
Chapter Two presents the theoretical framework and expands on the features of
relational rituals. The first two features identified in the definition of
relational rituals are their “formalised/schematic and conventionalised”
nature and their recurrence. Kádár places relational rituals within the
innermost circle of three concentric circles comprising (linguistic) acts that
have relatively fixed forms. Ordered from the outermost towards to innermost,
these are: Schematic acts, conventional relational acts, and ritual relational
acts. Schematic acts are defined as “pre-existing forms of behaviour used in
recurrent ways that are readily recognisable to members” (p. 25). Relational
rituals share with schematic acts their reference to the relational history of
the interactants and their possible lack of transparency to the outsider.
Conventional relational acts form the next level of the inner circle. These
are acts that pertain to relating and may operate in both societal and
in-group networks. They create normative expectancies and acquire fixed
pragmatic meanings for the group in question (p. 42). While relational rituals
are also conventionalised, they are distinguished by an emphasis on “mimetic
performance” (ibid.). Kádár describes the central feature of mimetic
performance as the enactment and re-enactment of “certain beliefs and values”
(p. 45). Ritual practice thereby co-constitutes relations in a ‘ritual
moment’. Quoting Koster (2003: 219), Kádár states that the ritual moment
creates “a temporary destruction of awareness of the wider meaningful
relations of one’s individuality and the reduction of the self to the
immediate experience of the here and now” (p. 48). Performance is central to
the understanding of ritual in the book, and I give one example below to
illustrate a number of recurring themes in the argumentation: how rituals may
‘neutralise’ to a convention or disappear; how they may crucially depend on
relational history; how they may interface with politeness; and how they
differ in the extent of their possibility of being recognised by outsiders to
a relational network.
During his stay in Taiwan, the author went to martial art training sessions
every day, where he became friends with a Taiwanese who was attending a
Chinese chef school and who was keen to talk about Chinese recipes and advise
the author on what Chinese dishes to taste. It became the author’s habit to
greet his friend with the question “What do we need to eat today?” uttered in
Chinese. The greeting enhances the “Taiwanese person’s professional identity
as a chef” and thus has politeness value for the interactants (p. 41). But it
also displays a performance value as it harks back to their conversations
about Chinese food. In this respect the utterance is not transparent as an
in-group conventionally polite act of greeting to an outsider. However, the
author remarks that the greeting lost its ritual value in time and “was
responded to with a standard ‘Hi’ and … was normatively expected to occur”
(p. 43). He cautions, however, that ritual value may be different for the
participants in an interaction.
The focus of Chapter Three is on the constructive and discursively organised,
fixed formal and functional properties of in-group rituals and network
identity formation, which may rely on in-group ethos and topics that are
significant for the network. In this chapter Kádár draws here on both e-mail
and historical Chinese epistolary discourse. He underscores that besides
network identity formation, rituals allow people to “act beyond social
conventions” (p. 62) and thereby prevent offence.
Chapter Four develops a typology of relational rituals based on their
visibility to outsiders rather than the size of the network. Ordered with
respect to transparency from the least to the most transparent, these are
covert, personal, in-group, and social rituals. The first type includes
rituals that are described in psychology as compulsive (delusional) rituals
which relate the performer to imaginary entities (e.g. imaginary relatives) or
compulsive behaviour (e.g. touching people several times when they touch the
performer). Covert rituals may evoke negative evaluations and be considered
unconventional for network insiders and outsiders. Irrespective of the
evaluation, Kádár notes that they assist “social ‘survival’” (p. 89). Personal
rituals, on the other hand, are more likely to conform to network expectancies
(e.g. praying). Significantly, covert rituals may become personal rituals if
they are not negatively evaluated (e.g., talk between parents and children on
imaginary entities). Similarly, if taken up by the in-group, personal rituals
may become in-group rituals. The author notes that the last two types also
differ in terms of accessibility. Yet another difference between in-group and
social rituals concerns their lifespans such that the former is more likely to
disappear if the relational network no longer exists.
The cognitive dimension of relational rituals is further examined in Chapter
Five with respect to their recognition in interaction and to their affective
value. Regarding the noticing of rituals, Kádár argues that rituals may rise
from “consciousness” to “awareness” through the performer’s reflexive
awareness that the ritual may be more noticeable to other participants. From
the perspective of the participant, the ritual may become “marked” if it is
counter to expectations or if the participant’s “interactional situation”
changes (p. 110). Based on this terminology, the author mainly discusses how
rituals may be (strategically) brought from unmarked consciousness to marked
awareness to effect relational outcomes (e.g. avoiding relational tension and
giving face). Following earlier work, Kádár describes emotion as an “internal
response” and affection as a “process of social interaction”, which produces
emotion. While short-term emotions may be tied to interaction per se,
long-term emotions produced by rituals concerns feelings of relatedness and
are referred to as affectivity/affection (pp. 114, 125, 197). The author
underscores that emotion in ritual may not have a means-ends pattern and that
they may fluctuate during the interaction itself.
Chapter Six investigates destructive rituals, which are defined as acts that
stigmatise a person and corrupt the relationship. The analysis shows that some
forms of impoliteness also occur in destructive rituals, with the difference
that destructive rituals are recurrent phenomena. Kádár explains that the
destructive rituals in his data fall into three types. Ordered from the least
visible to the most visible these are: Recurrent non-doing (e.g., exclusion
from social events); recurrent covert offence (e.g., seemingly harmless but
destructive jokes; and recurrent reference to the stigma (e.g., personal
features) (pp. 148-160). The analysis also points to the significance of
recognising rituals, but this time it is observed that stigmatised persons
attribute the higher-order intention of planning (Talliard 2002; Bratman,
1999) to victimise the person.
Chapter Seven, the conclusion, first summarises the advantages of viewing
rituals as discursive relational phenomena. Kádár notes that the relational
approach places rituals within the broader context of
schematic/conventionalised acts, thereby allowing for their contextualised
investigation. He further notes that the approach also provides a framework
for researching the ritual-politeness interface at the discursive level. Based
on findings in his ongoing cross-cultural project on rituals, Kádár points out
the need to research the cross-cultural significance attached to social
rituals and ideologies of rituality. Further avenues of research are also
notedm, such as studying historical conceptualisations of rituality, the
function of discursive repetition in the development of ritual, and rituals
between networks.
EVALUATION
With its explicit focus on relating, ‘Relational Rituals and Communication’
offers a new dimension to researching (linguistic) rituals from a discursive
perspective. As already noted, this work charts the analytic framework from
both the participant and the theoretical perspectives. A further significant
contribution is that it moves beyond the study of conventionalised
(ritualistic) speech act analysis to show that rituals may be expressed
through words, phrases and discourse frames. One of the volume’s strengths is
the variety of languages used to illustrate the framework. As such the book
promises to be a valuable resource for graduate students and researchers
investigating rituals and communication in pragmatics, social interaction,
(im)politeness, and cultural anthropology. In the following I dwell on some
theoretical aspects that are intended to develop future research, and point to
a terminological issue, with a suggestion for re-wording.
With good reason, Kádár’s definition of relational rituals highlights the
emergence of ritualised language from the relational history or the social
ethos of the participants. In this respect, the ritual practices that the
author discusses can be interpreted as dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense in
that one hears polyphonic voices and discourses (Bakhtin, 1981) that
(re-)create and (re-)shape ritual performances and frames of interaction
(e.g., the greeting reported in the summary). Intertwined with polyphony is
the notion of chronotopes, which place individuals within multiple time-space
dialogic interaction frames (Bakhtin 1981: 252). Systematically incorporating
such a dialogic understanding of ritual performance would enrich the analysis
of ritual moments in terms of changes in footing in the sense of participation
statuses (Goffman, 1979/1981) and the social frameworks (Goffman, 1974) that
are evoked in both constructive and destructive ritual practices. Expansion of
the framework along these lines would fall neatly into the analytic approach
in the work as the author himself too frequently refers to the animation of
voices and in-group ethos (e.g., pp. 19, 59). As ritual performance is closely
related to discursive identity construction (Koster, 2003), a dialogic
analysis could further elaborate how and what aspects of (relational) identity
are brought to consciousness and (strategically) employed in ritual practices.
Such an analytic approach could also open the way to future discursive
investigations of the interplay between relational rituals and power.
The recognition of a ritual practice is a significant aspect of the discursive
framework developed by Kádár. The author proposes two sets of terms in
discussing ritual practice that is considered normative for interactants and
cases of ritual practice that are made discursively salient either through
shifts in ritual frames effected by implicit and explicit metapragmatic
language or through metapragmatic talk on the ritual practice itself:
‘consciousness’ and ‘unmarked’ for ritual practice that is uncontested by
participants; and ‘awareness’ and ‘marked’ when a ritual practice becomes or
is made salient through metapragmatic devices (Verscheuren, 2000) or
discourse. Since the analyses of the data concern metapragmatic language and
discourse, a more suitable term in describing salient ritual practice
recognition could be ‘metapragmatic awareness’, as ‘consciousness’ and
‘awareness’ are used in overlapping senses both in everyday language and in
the technical literature, where terminology is notoriously varied (Velmans,
2009). It also seems to be more appropriate given the discursive analytic
approach employed in the book.
REFERENCES
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of
Texas Press.
Bratman, Michael E. 1999. Faces of Intention: Selected Essays on Intention and
Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Burke, Peter. 2005. The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays
on Perception and Communication. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Durkheim, Emile. 1912/1995. Karen E. Fields (trans.), The Elementary Forms of
Religious Life. New York: The Free Press.
Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of
Experience. New York: Harper & Row.
Goffman, Erving. 1979/1981. Footing. In Forms of Talk (pp. 124-159).
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Kádár, Daniel Z. 2007. On historical Chinese apology and its strategic
application. Journal of Politeness Research. Language, Behaviour, Culture 3.
125-150.
Koster, Jan. 2003. Ritual performance and the politics of identity: On the
function and uses of ritual. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 4. 211-248.
Taillard, Marie-Odile. 2002. Beyond communicative intention. UCL Working
Papers in Linguistics 14. 189-206.
Velmans, Max. 2009. Understanding Consciousness (2nd. edn). London/New York:
Routledge.
Verschueren, Jef. 2000. Notes on the role of metapragmatic awareness in
language use. Pragmatics 10. 439-456.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Sukriye Ruhi retired from Middle East Technical University as professor of
linguistics in 2012. She is currently manager of the Spoken Turkish Corpus
project. She has published articles and chapters on face and (im)politeness,
and continues research in these areas, along with research on emotion in
relating, and corpus linguistics.
May 29
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
AUTHOR: M. Grazia Busa
TITLE: Introducing the Language of the News
SUBTITLE: A Student’s Guide
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2013
REVIEWER: Sibo Chen, Simon Fraser University
SUMMARY
Living in the age of information, we are surrounded by news reports. These
stories not only keep us updated on current affairs around the globe, but also
fundamentally shape our values, beliefs, and behaviors through their
agenda-setting and framing effects. Thus, it is crucial for undergraduates who
are interested in news to learn the production of news texts and the functions
of language within this process.
Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, “Introducing the Language of the
News” aims to offer an accessible reference for the study of news from
linguistic perspectives. Using English news as its primary examples, this
textbook covers key issues within news discourse analysis and introduces how
different linguistic choices can highlight different interpretations of news
texts. In addition, the exercises after each chapter make the book an ideal
reference reading for students learning English news writing in an English as
a Foreign/Second Language (i.e., EFL/ESL) context.
Introduction: Language and Texts
The introduction overviews “linguistic competence” and “register”. The author
highlights several factors contributing to variation in language use in our
daily lives: communicative purposes, discourse participants, communication
media (e.g., spoken versus written), and social contexts (e.g., formal versus
informal). In short, this introductory chapter discusses key components of
genre/register research and sets the theoretical background for the discussion
of news discourse in the following chapters.
Chapter One: Making News
The focus of Chapter One is the media industry and driving factors of news
production. To be specific, the chapter reviews six factors of news
production: media ownership, market pressure, labor division with the
newsroom, time deadline and space-on-the-page constraints, information
technology, and convergence of media forms.
Chapter Two: Defining News
This chapter provides a definition of news and explains factors influencing
the writing of news stories. According to the author, news can be defined as
“the relaying of events that are both recent (new) and relevant (interesting)”
(p. 25). Following such a definition, the author reviews the primary factors
that make a story potentially newsworthy: timeliness, location, topic and
familiarity, pictures and multimedia, dramatic potential, and public
interests. In addition to newsworthiness, objectivity is another crucial
standard for news texts and it determines the neutral language style of news
texts. The author concludes this chapter by explaining different types of
newspapers (e.g., broadsheets versus tabloids) and stories (e.g., hard news
versus soft news).
Chapter Three: Sourcing News
Chapter Four: Conveying Meaning through Design
These two short chapters (each is 10 pages long) briefly review the
information gathering stage of news production and the visual layout of a
newspaper page. Chapter Three starts by making a distinction between on-diary
sources (i.e., regular contacts of journalists) and off-diary sources (i.e.,
contacts reached by journalists when unanticipated events happen). The chapter
then reviews general issues regarding interviews and how information gathered
by journalists is used in news stories: attributions, anonymous sources, and
quotations. Following the above discussion, Chapter Four focuses on print news
and analyzes how page design (e.g., the position of headlines, pictures, body
copies, etc.) represents a powerful form of non-verbal communication.
Chapter Five: Structuring the Story
Chapter Six: Head, Lead and Proper Story
These two Chapters examine news story structures and the linguistic features
of news headlines, leads and the body copies. To be specific, Chapter Five
deals with three basic features of news stories: story structure, impersonal
language, and coherent texts. The chapter starts with an overview of three
common structures of news stories: the inverted pyramid, narrative
storytelling, and the hourglass (i.e., a combination of the previous two).
Then, the chapter goes into an exploration of impersonal writing and how
certain linguistic rules (e.g., the avoidance of first- or second-person
pronouns and emotive words or expressions) maintain the objectivity of news.
The chapter concludes with a brief explanation of coordination and
subordination and their function in language coherence.
By comparison, the focus of Chapter Six is on the components of news stories
(e.g., headlines, leads and body copies) and their grammatical features and
embedded rhetorical strategies. The author first discusses the synthetic
language of news headlines and how such linguistic characteristics lead to a
nominalization tendency in news headlines. Then, the discussion of news
headlines shifts to their rhetorical features (e.g., intertextuality, word
association, and metaphor), followed by an overview of informative headlines.
Finally, the chapter explains two types of news leads (i.e., direct leads and
delayed leads) and offers an example of how information is structured in the
body section.
Chapter Seven: The Tools of the Trade
Chapter Eight: Reporting Information and Evaluation of Likelihood
Chapter Nine: The Power of Words
The final three chapters are the most linguistic-centric ones, as they offer
an overview of linguistic strategies used in news discourse. Chapter Seven
examines the linguistic strategies used by journalists to compact lots of
information in short texts, such as nominalization, brevity (e.g., using
“although” instead of “despite the fact that”), and the passive voice. The
chapter then reviews some general syntactic issues in news writing: verbal
structure, voice, and thematization.
Chapter Eight discusses how journalists use various linguistic choices to
convert news sources into news stories. The Chapter explores two aspects of
information reporting: the use of reported speech (e.g., direct quote,
indirect quote, paraphrase, etc.), and the use of modality (e.g., epistemic
modality versus deontic modality).
Finally, Chapter Nine explains the “power of words” and how newswriters can
exploit the expressive potential of language to convey particular stances on
news topics. The primary focus of the chapter is the English language, and the
author demonstrates how careful word choices influence readers’
interpretations of the same news event, reinforce society’s perception of
certain groups, and promote particular ideologies.
EVALUATION
Overall, this book presents a concise but well-organized introduction of news
production and discourse. Covering a wide range of topics in only 164 pages,
the book can serve as a good complementary reading for ESL/EFL learners
interested in English news. As mentioned earlier, the student exercises at the
end of each chapter make the book ready-to-use for ESL/EFL instructors. In
addition, the book’s language style is straightforward and succinct, which is
another advantage for its usage in ESL/EFL settings.
Meanwhile, there are two minor limitations within the book, which might be
addressed in its further editions. First, the book may consider re-organizing
certain chapters to make its presentational logic more coherent. Chapter Three
(Sourcing News) can be combined with Chapter Eight (Reporting Information and
Evaluation of Likelihood), as many linguistic details of the former are not
properly explained until the latter. Similarly, Chapter Five (Structuring the
Story) and Chapter Six (Head, Lead and Proper Story) can be combined, since
both chapters deal with the structuring of news texts. Second, although the
book’s simplicity is a desired design for its primary readers (ESL/EFL
learners), it would still be beneficial if more theories regarding news
discourse were introduced in the book. In the current version, the critical
analysis of news discourse is only introduced in the very last chapter and
several key texts within the field (e.g., Fairclough, 1989; van Dijk, 1988)
are not discussed. In the discussion of the media industry (Chapters One &
Two), some additional reviews of the political economy of communication would
also be beneficial (e.g. Mosco, 2009; Wasko, Murdock & Sousa, 2011).
Overall, the book is a good reference for intro-level courses on language and
communication, especially for ESL/EFL learners who want a concise overview of
English news discourse.
REFERENCES
Busa, M. G. (2013). “Introducing the language of the news”. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Fairclough, N. (1989). “Language and power”. London: Longman.
Mosco, V. (2009). “The political economy of communication” (2nd ed.). London:
Sage.
Wasko, J., Murdock, G., & Sousa, H. (2011). “The handbook of political economy
of communications”. London: Sage.
Van Dijk, T. (1988). “News as discourse”. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum
Associates.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Sibo Chen is a PHD student in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser
University. He received his MA in Applied Linguistics from the Department of
Linguistics, University of Victoria, Canada. His major research interests are
language and communication, discourse analysis, and genre theories.
May 26
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
EDITOR: Piotr Cap
EDITOR: Urszula Okulska
TITLE: Analyzing Genres in Political Communication
SUBTITLE: Theory and practice
SERIES TITLE: Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 50
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2013
REVIEWER: Sibo Chen, Simon Fraser University
SUMMARY
Although investigations of political language have been a pivotal topic in
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), the broad body of previous studies has done
relatively little to provide a comprehensive and organized set of answers to
the theoretical complexities of political genre research. Given that
situation, “Analyzing Genres in Political Communication” has a two-fold
objective: “(1) to make a contribution to the study of genres in political
communication; and (2) to offer insights that add to the analysis of
communicative genres in general (p. 11)”. With contributions from a range of
experts with diverse backgrounds, this edited collection presents the latest
developments in political genre analysis and can be informative for
researchers in a wide range of disciplines, such as Applied Linguistics,
Communication, Political Science, and other fields.
The introduction, “Analyzing Genres in Political Communication”, addresses
general problems in genre analysis and overviews the studies in the following
chapters. Generally speaking, genre could be interpreted as: (1) abstractions
of communicative acts, (2) indicators of situational contexts, (3) flexible
macrostructures with both obligatory and optional elements, (4) interrelated
units in a social field, and (5) assigners of social roles for their
participants (pp. 3-7). In the field of political genre analysis, research
thus far has been mainly conducted at the national level, focusing on
discourse with significant mediation functions, such as political speeches,
press conferences, debates, and so on. Overall, research in political genres
poses three key questions for the theory of communicative genres (pp. 8-9):
A. The heterogeneity of political genres questions the analytical consistency
proposed by genre theories: Can the current methodological procedures
adequately address the typologies and hierarchies observed in political
genres?
B. The analysis of political genres requires the revisit of many common
properties of communicative genres: Do these properties also apply to
political genres, especially those on situational contexts and social
relations?
C. The interactions between policies and political genres bring the issue of
genre accomplishment: Is there a hypothetical “hyper-genre” in general for
various forms of political communication?
To address these questions, the collection explores various genres within
political communication in 12 chapters, divided into two parts based on their
research focus: “theory-driven approaches” (Part I: Chapters 1-6) and
“data-driven approaches” (Part II: Chapters 7-12).
Chapter One, “Genres in Political Discourse”, follows up on the theoretical
account in the introduction and reviews genre theories in various traditions:
the “New Rhetoric” approach (Bazerman, 1988), the “Systemic Functional
Grammar” approach (Martin, 1992), the “Functional Move” approach (Swales,
1990), and the “Socio-critical” approach (Bhatia, 2004). Then, the chapter
provides an analysis of Austrian chancellors’ inaugural speeches and concludes
that analyses of politically sensitive genres need to not only focus on
generic features of political texts, but also to account for the texts’
relevant registers and discourses.
Chapter Two, “Political Interviews in Context”, presents an analysis of
political interviews based on an integration of various discourse methods,
such as conversation analysis, pragmatics, social psychology, and content
analysis. The authors conceptualize political interviews as a “hybrid genre”
in essence and discuss how this hybrid genre frequently departures from its
default organization.
Chapter Three, “Policy, Policy Communication and Discursive Shifts”, deals
with the European Union’s (EU) policy discourses on climate change via a
critical discourse analysis of its policy documents. The analysis was
conducted from two perspectives: policy-making and policy-communication. The
conclusion reached is that the EU discourse on climate change can be
characterized by a large degree of discursive change that frames climate
change from an EU perspective (i.e. climate change as a crisis will threaten
EU’s future economy and presents a global crisis).
Chapter Four, “The Television Election Night Broadcast”, describes the genres
and sub-genres of television election night broadcasts and demonstrates that
they, as a macro-genre, involve complex interlocking of different genres
(speeches, interviews, breaking news, etc.), which shows how complex generic
structures are influenced by both internal and external factors. The
structures of election night broadcasts depend on the external social and
political contexts in which they are situated as well as their internal
communication logic and information economy.
Chapter Five “Analyzing Meetings in Political and Business Contexts” focuses
on meetings in political and business contexts and explores common strategies
shared in both situations. The chapter highlights the scarcity of theories of
meetings across different settings and discusses specific discursive
strategies in spontaneous interactions during meetings. Based on comparative
analyses of political and business meetings, the chapter further investigates
the impact of organization knowledge on the meeting genre as well as the role
of communications for genre identification.
Chapter Six, “Presenting Politics”, the last chapter of Part I, serves as a
transition between the collection’s two parts and offers a reflection on
persuasion and performance across political genres. The chapter reviews two
approaches to addressing persuasion in political communication (persuasion as
a psychological process versus persuasion as a cultural performance). The
chapter tackles Question C (see above): given the heterogeneity of political
genres and their theoretical frameworks, can the complexity of political
genres be addressed within the existing genre theories, or should the research
go beyond them?
Chapters in Part II pay more attention to the investigation of specific genres
through data-driven methods. Chapter Seven, “Legitimizing the Iraq War”,
discusses the theory of legitimation through the rhetoric of judge-penitence.
The chapter further analyzes the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s
self-critiques of Danish collaboration with German Nazis during World War II,
which established moral credibility and moral ground for the legitimation of
the Danish government’s engagement in the Iraqi war.
Chapter Eight, “Macro and Micro, Quantitative and Qualitative”, explores
election night speeches in Britain and German and addresses the most typical
characteristic in political speeches: the construction of the binary
opposition of “us versus them”. Based on quantitative and qualitative
analyses, the chapter shows that for election night speeches, the
cross-cultural similarities at the micro level may not correspond to
similarities at the macro level.
Chapter Nine, “Reframing the American Dream”, examines the genre of political
debates. Focusing on the final televised presidential debate in the 2008 US
election, the chapter argues that the ‘nation as family’ metaphor proposed by
Lakoff (2002) has significant implications for US political discourse. The two
competing moral models (paternal vs. maternal) within US politics were
consolidated through the strategic use of personal references and pronouns by
John McCain and Barack Obama during the debate.
Chapter Ten, “The Late-night TV Talk Show as a Strategic Genre”, and Chapter
Eleven, “Multimodal Legitimation”, continue to investigate the 2008 US
presidential election, exploring late night shows and online election
advertisements. To be specific, Chapter Ten works with a selection of popular
talk shows in US and shows that their generic conventions tend to be recruited
to suit politician’s aims. By comparison, Chapter Eleven approaches the
multimodal legitimation offered by Obama’s 2008 campaign and discusses the
general question of hybridity within political genres: if a well-established
genre (e.g. political speeches) was adapted into a non-conventional
communication form (e.g. online advertisements), would it continue to dominate
the legitimation process of political communications, or would it be reduced
to a supportive role? The analysis in Chapter Eleven highlights the
significance of semiotic simultaneity in multimodal legitimation.
Finally, Chapter Twelve, “Blogging as the Mediatization of Politics”, deals
with the issue of mediation offered by political blogs, reflecting the
digitization and interdiscursivity of online discourse. Based on quantitative
corpus analysis, the study scrutinizes the functional and structural features
of political blogs. Overall, the chapter shows how political communication
function as a complex network with increasingly mediated and interactive
practices of civil society.
EVALUATION
In summary, this book presents an in-depth and comprehensive analysis of
political communication from the genre perspective. Covering a wide range of
genres, tit demonstrates not only the complexity of political genres
themselves, but also the contributions of political communication for genre
theories. Specifically, Chapters Five and Six provide theoretical updates on
current political genre research, showing how studies on political genres can
further benefit not only genre theory, but also other disciplines such as
political science and communication. Meanwhile, Part II continues the
theoretical discussion of legitimation, which can benefit the growing body of
scholarship in this area. Finally, this volume also offers much needed
insights on political TV talk shows and political blogs, which have previously
received little linguistic attention but are becoming significant
communicative phenomena in public discourse.
Unfortunately, the book does have one minor limitation, which might be
addressed in a future edition: it focuses exclusively on the Western context.
All chapters are based on political communications in Europe and United
States, which limits some of the findings to non-western contexts such as Asia
and Latin America. As pointed out in Chapter Eight, further studies based on
non-western cultures may “contribute even more to the way political genres can
be defined without running the risk of a Western bias” (p. 287) and in this
regard, more studies based on non-Western contexts in a future edition would
further improve the book’s theoretical depth and breadth.
Overall, though, this book offers significant theoretical and methodological
updates for genre theories. The book is sure to appeal to genre scholars as
well as those in related disciplines. It is an interesting and useful
collection with a wealth of up-to-date information for anyone interested in
political genres.
REFERENCES
Bazerman, C. (1988). “Shaping written knowledge: The genre and activity of the
experimental article in science”. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Bhatia, V. (2004). “Worlds of written discourse”. London: Continuum.
Lakoff, G. (2002). “Moral politics: How liberals and conservatives think”.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Martin, J. (1992). English text. Systems and structure.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Swales, J. (1990). “Genre analysis: English in academic and research
settings”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Sibo Chen is a graduate student in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser
University. He received his MA in Applied Linguistics from the Department of
Linguistics, University of Victoria, Canada. His major research interests are
language and communication, discourse analysis, and genre theories.
Apr 10
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
AUTHOR: Monika Bednarek
AUTHOR: Helen Caple
TITLE: News Discourse
SERIES TITLE: Bloomsbury Discourse
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2012
REVIEWER: Chrystie Myketiak, Queen Mary, University of London
SUMMARY
“News Discourse,” by Monika Bednarek and Helen Caple, is part of the
longstanding Bloomsbury Discourse Series edited by Ken Hyland that provides
students and researchers with introductions to core topics in discourse
studies. This particular volume consists of nine chapters plus two appendices
that discuss news discourse as it pertains to language and image in news
construction. In addition to providing an introduction to the topic, with a
non-exclusive focus on newspapers, the authors also provide frameworks for
their own approaches to analysing language and image in soft and hard news
stories, drawing from examples across news modalities and forms. The book’s
final chapter is a case study of online video news reporting about the death
of Osama Bin Laden that makes use of material discussed in the book’s
discursive and methodological chapters. Roughly speaking, Chapters 1, 2, 4 and
5 could be seen as providing introductions to news discourse, while Chapters
3, 6, 7, 8, and 9 could be treated as methodological.
Each chapter in the text begins with an introductory paragraph, a list of
objectives, and a section that operationalizes the main terms and concepts
discussed in the chapter. Similarly uniform is the list of suggested readings
at the end of each chapter. The directions for further reading provide
viewpoints both complementary and alternative to the ones presented in the
chapter. The authors also provide a concise summary of each reading to aid
readers.
Chapter 1 operationalizes ‘news discourse’, stating that it is necessary to do
so in ways that prioritise each of the two words in the term. The authors make
clear that for their purposes discourse is multisemiotic and includes language
and image in news construction. They differentiate themselves from those who
focus exclusively on language as well as those who observe discourse as a
reflection of news, rather than as an active construction of it. The chapter
introduces readers to the various types of news discourse that are discussed
over the course of the volume (e.g., print, online, television, radio,
podcasts, etc.) and provides an overview for various approaches to its
analysis. Bednarek and Caple provide descriptions of eight distinct linguistic
approaches to news discourse and another four approaches that are within the
domain of media/journalism and communications. The chapter closes with a
summary and discussion of the book’s structure.
Chapter 2 begins with five objectives that are squarely placed in the ‘how’
camp: how news develops, and is produced, consumed, regulated, and financed.
The authors argue that understanding these five topics is necessary in order
for researchers to contextualise their data analysis. They describe the
communicative context of news as a complex triangle between news discourse,
producers, and audience with energy transferring in all directions. Bednarek
and Caple then provide a sociohistorical context for news discourse,
discussing the development of the print news media in the UK, as well as its
digitization, financing, and regulation.
The topic of news values, as defined by Bell (1991:155), is introduced as the
focus of Chapter 3. Although Bednarek and Caple also provide four other
definitions of news values, they make clear that “what these different
definitions have in common, however, is that news values are said to determine
what makes something newsworthy — worthy of being news” (p. 40). They further
draw on Bell (1991) in their categorisation of news values (Bell’s are in
parentheses): news writing objectives (values in news text), news cycle/market
factors (values in news process), and news values (values in news actors and
events). From there the authors develop a news values summary, which includes
elements similar to other such discussions (e.g., Cotter 2010; O’Neill and
Harcup 2009; Richardson 2007). What follows from this is a short discussion of
whether news values are cognitively or discursively conceptualised. Bednarek
and Caple then consider news values and linguistic devices. This discussion
includes but is not limited to evaluative language, intensification and
quantification, word combinations, story structure, and first-person plural
pronouns. From there the authors turn to news values and image, using some of
the same subthemes as listed above but also incorporating aesthetic elements.
The chapter concludes with a return to their original news value summary. At
this point they provide and discuss examples of news stories as they pertain
to each news value in order to discuss how news values are construed in
discourse.
News discourse as a language variety is the focus of Chapter 4. Bednarek and
Caple outline key lexical and syntactic features that distinguish news
discourse from other linguistic varieties. They discuss the prevalence of
nouns, subsequent nominalisations, and prepositional phrases in print news.
The authors suggest that noun phrases work to evaluate and label news actors
and sources. With respect to verbs, the authors provide data from a corpus of
UK news discourse, arguing that ‘will/would’ are key verbs, and that finite
verbs rarely occur in the passive voice. They argue that time specification is
the most common type of adverbial and that linking adverbials are rare. This
discussion leads into the topic of the structure of the news story, which they
posit can be separated into three parts in most print genres: headline,
intro/lead, and body/lead development. The topic of ‘headlinese’ is discussed
in some detail, including features, verbs, and examples of headlines. Online,
radio, and television news headlines are discussed in the last section of the
chapter.
Chapter 5 shifts attention to still and moving images in the news, including
which images are used and their purpose/s in news coverage. The communicative
function of news images is discussed and is divided into a number of
categories: illustration, evidence, sensation, icon, evaluation, and
aesthetic. The relationship between text and image is discussed, including
image and caption relations, image and headline relations, and image and body
text relations. The final section discusses text and image relations in
sequenced images.
In Chapter 6, the authors provide the first of two frameworks for analysing
language and image in news discourse: a linguistic framework for analysing the
role of language in news stories. Bednarek and Caple discuss various
parameters of their framework: un/importance, in/comprehensibility,
im/possibility and in/ability, un/necessity, emotivity, in/authenticity,
reliability, un/expectedness, evidentiality, and mental state. The chapter
ends with a discussion of other issues for consideration, focusing on
evaluation of the sentiment behind the text: namely, whether or not the
journalist is expressing an opinion, what (if anything) is being evaluated,
the degree of evaluation, and the purpose of evaluation.
Chapter 7 complements the previous chapter, providing a framework for
analysing image composition. Here the authors draw on Caple’s training and
career as a press photographer to claim that news image composition is based
on balance and symmetry. They develop a framework for analysing balance and
composition in news discourse, which includes: image frame, elements, and
visual unit of information. The authors also discuss a number of different
patterns in photographs, the importance of aesthetics, and problematic or
‘ugly’ images.
Chapter 8 applies the frameworks of the previous two chapters (evaluation in
language and image composition) in analysing the topic of the stand-alone
print news story. The authors explain the concept of the stand-alone story and
provide a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis of stand-alones
in the Sydney Morning Herald. The quantitative analysis focuses on composition
and evaluation while the differences between soft and hard news stories are
discussed primarily using qualitative research. Their argument is that images
in this format are of good composition and a high technical standard, and that
the headlines associated with the images tend towards playfulness (e.g.,
through the use of puns, allegories, etc.). They found this to be the case
with both hard and soft stand-alone stories, and assert that this could be
considered inappropriate for some hard news stories, which tend to focus on
material events that affect people’s lives.
The final chapter, Chapter 9, is a case study that focuses on Osama Bin
Laden’s death. As with Chapter 8, the emphasis here is on applying their
frameworks and concepts to the study of news discourse. They discuss the
reason for selecting this example over other global news events during the
same period (2010/2011). They then apply earlier discussed frameworks and
concepts from Chapters 3-5 to their analysis of two video clips approximately
one minute in length from the websites of public news broadcasters in
Australia and the United Kingdom.
The volume also contains two appendices and an index.
EVALUATION
“News Discourse” is a volume on an interesting subject that merges two
important and interconnected topics within news discourse: text and image.
Bednarek and Caple introduce readers to the field while also providing
methodological frameworks to aid in data analysis. The book fills an important
gap in the existing literature in that it considers news discourse in a
variety of mediums, and gives equal weighting to image and text. The volume
will be particularly useful to students or those moving into this research
field as it provides both an overview to the topic and a toolkit for analysing
news.
This is a book that takes on a great deal: it is an introductory text, a
methodological guide, and it covers both image and language. The breadth of
material ensures that the book will be useful to students and researchers of
news texts and images across a range of disciplines. However, as a result of
the ambitious range of approaches and key studies discussed alongside their
own analyses, there are sections where the exposition seems too brief. This is
especially true in some of the chapters emphasising methodological frameworks,
where a topic is introduced and discussed for a single paragraph before the
authors move onto the next theme.
The short sections and subsections that move between distinct ideas allow
Bednarek and Caple to cover much terrain but further elaboration of some of
their themes (and subthemes) and frameworks might have been helpful to
readers. For example, their discussion of cognitive and discursive approaches
to news values might have benefited from further elaboration and/or clarity.
The authors state (p. 44) that the cognitive perspective holds the position
that news values originate in mental assumptions and categorisation, but this
is not taken any further (i.e., how do these assumptions and categories come
into being?). Similarly, “from a discursive perspective […] newsworthiness
is construed through discourse (both language and image)” (p. 44). For readers
not steeped in the discussion already, these definitions provide little
clarification of cognitive and discursive approaches to news values.
Chapters 4 and 7 stand out as providing excellent mixtures of
concepts/frameworks and supporting data. These two chapters will be of
particular interest to linguists researching or teaching in the area as well
as linguistics students. Chapter 4, which focuses on news discourse as a
language variety, includes discussions of linguistic features specific to news
discourse and their functions. Bednarek and Caple provide a broad set of
examples to illustrate their argument as well as a framework to use in
approaching news text. Chapter 7 focuses on composition, balance, and
aesthetics in image composition, which is an important but under-examined area
within the study of news discourse. The authors’ introduction to image
composition and analysis is accessible and provides a wide range of examples
of images to support their frameworks.
It is impressive that the authors balance their treatment of text with image,
and concept with framework. However, the way that this is sequenced in the
volume is somewhat unclear. Although there is a section of the introduction
dedicated to the ‘[s]tructure and summary of the book’ (p. 14-17), it does
not include how the chapters fit together, why the book is structured as it
is, or any clear reason for their sequencing. It may have been helpful to
readers had the authors explained how the chapters follow from each other, and
why the authors favoured this sequence and division of material as opposed to
other equally valid strategies.
One issue that it might have been interesting for Bednarek and Caple explore
is whether text and image must be analysed using separate frameworks, and to
be explicit about where independent analysis joins up again. The authors
structure the discussion of text and image quite separately in earlier
chapters but analyse the two together in the latter chapters. Chapter 8 uses
examples to examine language and image in soft and hard news stories and their
case study in Chapter 9 looks at an online video story (thus combining image
and language). However, the frameworks that they provided earlier in the book
treat image and text rather separately.
“News Discourse” is a valuable addition to the Bloomsbury Discourse series; it
covers an interesting topic in a novel way that will be of interest to a wide
readership. More importantly, the volume does so in a way that is timely both
in the modalities under consideration and the data used. Bednarek and Caple’s
book incorporates an extensive range of material and examines the crucial
interplay of text and image in contemporary news discourse. The book will be
useful to researchers and students interested in linguistic, media, or
discursive approaches to analysing news texts and images.
REFERENCES
Bell, A. 1991. The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.
Cotter, C. 2010. News Talk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
O’Neill, D. and Harcup, T. 2009. “News Values and Selectivity,” in K. Wahl
Jorgensen and T. Hanitzsch (eds.), The Handbook of Journalism Studies. New
York: Routledge, pp.161-174.
Richardson, J.E. 2007. Analysing Newspapers: An Approach from Critical
Discourse Analysis. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Chrystie Myketiak is a postdoctoral fellow at Queen Mary, University of London
where she works on CHI+MED, a project at the intersection of human-computer
interaction and medical safety. Her research combines media, health, and
discourse in a variety of ways, including: medical errors in incident reports;
the construction of blame in news about medical errors; and online sex talk.
She holds a PhD in Computer Science (Interaction, Media, and Communication)
and Linguistics from the University of London.
Mar 18
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
AUTHOR: Alexandra Jaffe
TITLE: Stance
SUBTITLE: Sociolinguistic Perspectives
SERIES TITLE: Oxford Studies in Sociolinguistics
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2012
REVIEWER: Simone C. Bacchini, British Library
SUMMARY
“Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives” is, in the words of its editor, ‘a
sociolinguistic exploration of one of the fundamental properties of
communication: stancetaking’ (3). In its ten chapters, the contributors to
this volume offer explorations of some of the ways in which speakers’
positionality is linguistically encoded through various lexicogrammatical and
discursive means. Although, for the most part, the essays contained in this
volume refer to contemporary English language examples, the collection also
contains cases of non-English contexts and, in one of these, a
non-contemporary situation.
This volume refers to encodings of speakers’ positionality as ‘stance’ and
‘stancetaking’. As Jaffe explains, stancetaking refers to ‘taking up a
position with respect to the form and content of one’s utterance’ (3). Jaffe
clearly acknowledges that the linguistic encoding of stance is not new.
However, she rightly points out that each act of stancetaking is, by its very
nature, both socially situated and dialogic: it occurs in a specific social
context, which contributes to its shape; and it responds, directly or
indirectly, to other possible stances a speaker might take in ways that are
socially and interactionally relevant. With time, repeated acts of
stancetaking can become indexical, at a higher level, of things such as
femininity, for example. It is against these backdrops of indexicality that
further stancetaking then takes place.
The main way in which the studies presented in this volume differ from
previous ones is that their perspective is clearly sociolinguistic. What this
means is that here, the approaches taken are ‘explicitly socially grounded’
(Coupland 1991: 99). As Jaffe explains, a sociolinguistic approach to stance
and stancetaking is interested in the ways in which speakers ‘draw upon
sociolinguistic resources and repertoires to signal positionality’ (10). What
is meant by ‘sociolinguistic resources’ is ‘forms of variation that have
established social indexicalities’ (10). All the studies in this volume
successfully deal with a number of such indexicalities: authoritative speech,
rationality vs. irrationality, moral irony, and elitism, to name but a few.
This collection of essays opens with an exhaustive introduction (Chapter One)
by the volume’s editor, Alexandra Jaffe. In it, the aim of the work is clearly
stated: ‘to map the sociolinguistics of stance, bringing together analyses
that allow […] to explore both what the study of stance has to offer
sociolinguistic theory, and to define the territory occupied by
sociolinguistic approaches to stance’ (3). The extent to which it is
successful will be addressed later. As Jaffe makes clear, the goal of her
introduction is not to provide a general overview of research on stance, but
rather, more modestly, to ‘identify dimensions of stance research that are
particularly salient for sociolinguistics, and to situate the sociolinguistic
focus on stance in relation to related concepts and currents of analysis
within sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology’ (4).
Jaffe provides the reader with a useful introduction to the study of stance by
first defining the object of enquiry and then by clearly explaining why a
sociolinguistic approach, as opposed to other available approaches, is a
productive one is shedding light on the various choices speakers and writers
make when they encode positionality within a text.
Chapter Two (Stance, Style, and the Linguistic Individual), by Barbara
Johnstone, is a discourse analytical study of one particular individual’s
textual production (i.e. including both talk and writing) across a variety of
genres and over a number of years. The analysis also makes use of biographical
and historical data on the sociolinguistic and ideological contexts in which
this well-known U.S political figure, Barbara Jordan, operated, and how, in
turn, her linguistically encoded examples of stancetaking became indexical,
through repetition, of this particular individual’s identity. For example,
Johnstone points how the late U.S. politician established personal authority
by repeated acts of linguistic epistemic and interactional stancetaking. Both
in face-to-face interviews and in public speaking, Jordan would present and
project moral and epistemological authority by highlighting (and thus drawing
attention to) her knowledgeability, the power of intellect, her adherence to
principle and her thoughtfulness. Explicit markers of evidentiality, encoded
linguistically through markers such as ‘I think’, ‘in my opinion’ and phrases
like ‘this may be too much of a generalization’, are convincingly shown by
Johnstone to contribute to the establishment of Jordan as a (in this instance)
thoughtful individual.
Chapter Three (Stance in a Colonial Encounter: How Mr. Taylor Lost His
Footing), by Judith T. Irvine, makes use of Goffman’s (1981) notions of
‘faultables’ and of ‘audience’ to better understand the concept of ‘stance’.
She does this by offering an analysis of archival material, in this case,
letters held in the archive of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) from their
nineteenth-century missions in West Africa. The letters concern a violent
dispute among missionaries, which resulted in the corpus of letters between
the missionaries, their locally-based bishop, and the church authorities in
London. Irvine clearly and convincingly shows how – through stancetaking – the
different social actors involved (i.e. the missionaries and their local
bishops) positioned themselves vis-à-vis the ‘faultable’ actions of one
particular missionary. The author points out that often an excessive emphasis
on speaker intentionality and agency in stancetaking obscures how dispreferred
stances can be imposed on speakers by others. These stances, in turn, are
shaped and influenced by the various social and power structures in which such
speakers operate.
In Chapter Four, Janet McIntosh takes an ethnographic approach to examine the
narratives of white Kenyans. She shows how, through stance choices, they
ostensibly establish distance between their rational, Western selves and the
superstitious, irrational belief system of black Kenyans. However, McIntosh
shows that, in closer inspections, these white Kenyans’ belief system is less
coherent and more porous than they would like their listener to believe. In
fact, their cumulative stance choices reveal a degree of anxiety about the
possibility of cultural assimilation and suggest that these choices might
serve to perform a preferred identity.
Chapter Five, by Robin Shoaps, aims, in the author’s words, to ‘demonstrate
the necessity of ethnographic research for the study of resources for indirect
stancetaking and how they are deployed in naturally occurring speech
situations’ (92). Shoaps’s is the first study in the collection which looks at
a language other than English; she examines, Sakalputek, a Mayan language
spoken in Guatemala. The author looks at constructions that encode what she
terms ‘moral irony’ which, superficially, resemble ironic constructions in
English. These constructions, she argues, provide an important resource in
Sakalputek for indirect stancetaking. Shoaps argues that in these
constructions, ‘moral irony’ is ‘modal’ ‘not only because the construction
makes use of modal particles, but because, semiotically, it projects a realm
of possible actions and a possible division between the speaker or animator
and principal or agent who takes responsibility for or is committed to the
hypothetical stance or action’ (112-113). It is ‘ironic’ because – following
Goffman – the principal ‘who is committed to the possible stance is distinct
from the animator who, in the moment of speaking, rejects the stance or
action’ (113). For example, in an encounter where, as customary in Mayan
culture, a bride receives advice from her kin the night before the wedding,
the bride’s aunt (in this case) advising her niece not to make her father (who
is deceased) ashamed qualifies her statement by saying (107): ‘as if because
you don’t have a father anymore you can put your mother in shame [,] and as if
he’s over and done with’. Here, the aunt uses moral irony to indicate ‘an
imagined stance of some other principal who endorses the erroneous idea that
because the girl’s father is dead’ (107) she is not expected to hold the same
standards of respectability.
Chapter Six is by Alexandra Jaffe. In it, the volume’s editor explores how
teachers in a bilingual Corsican-French primary school produce acts of
sociolinguistic stance, which, in turn, position the two languages within the
classroom. Through the repetition of such acts, Jaffe argues, the pupils’
instructors simultaneously accomplish two things: they offer ‘ideal models of
bilingual practice and identity’ (119) whilst, at the same time, attributing
stances to their students. The analysis offered in this chapter illustrates
how the sociolinguistic stance encoded by bilingual instruction in the
classroom highlights the ways in which ‘the conventional association between
language and social categories, linguistic ideologies, and language
hierarchies’ (143) are themselves indicators of stance.
Chapter Seven, by Mary Bucholtz, looks at the use of of the lexical item
‘güey’ by Mexican and Mexican American youth as both a marker of
‘interactional alignment and of a particular gendered style’ (147). Through
her analysis, Bucholtz sheds light on the ways in which stance and style are
attended to simultaneously through the use of slang. She argues that contrary
to what its critics often claim, ‘güey’ is not a mere verbal filler. Instead,
it is a ‘highly expressive [term], performing a range of functions within
discourse’ (150). For example it may function as an address term, an insulting
or noninsulting reference term, or a discourse marker that indicates focus as
emphasis. However, it can also index solidarity, ‘especially during
face-threatening social actions’ (152). In an example that Bucholtz provides
(153), a young man travelling on a bus with a school friend comments on a
motorist’s driving he sees through the bus window. He says: ‘hey idiot.
(pause). This güey can’t go here. He has to go on the right’. Here, the term
had a double function: that of a reference term but also a mildly insulting
epithet. In the following example (152), the term simply functions as an
address term: (one of the boys’ phone rings. The boy takes it out of his
pocket and puts it to his ear) ‘What’s going on güey? What’s going on güey?’
Chapter Eight is by Scott F. Kiesling. Looking at three examples of situated
talk (i.e. recorded interviews and interactions in a U.S. college fraternity,
recorded interaction among female colleagues who shared similar jobs in
university administration, and the use of the phonological realization of
word-final ‘-er’ by second generation Italian and Greek immigrants in Sydney),
Kiesling argues that speakers’ stances are the primary means through which
they organize interaction. Stance, which he defines as ‘a person’s expression
of their relationship to their talk’ (172), then becomes the ‘precursor, or
primitive, in sociolinguistic variation’ (172).
Chapter Nine, by Adam Jaworski and Crispin Thurlow, is an exploration of one
particular type of stance: elitism, as encoded in the language of travelogues
in the travel sections of two British newspapers. The chapter offers an
examination of elitism ‘as an everyday discursive accomplishment in the light
of a critique of contemporary class privilege and social inequality’ (195).
The authors highlight the inherently ideological significance that stances
take which, enhanced by their ability to draw little attention to themselves,
become a powerful tool for the preservation and propagation of positions such
as elitism. For example, one frequently-made in travel writing is the
distinction between ‘tourists’ and ‘travellers’. Tourists are seen as
sophisticated, often driven by a desire to conform and to ‘take in’ as much as
possible; quantity over quality, mere escapism versus a true cultural desire
to learn, understand, and improve oneself through travel. As the two authors
point out, this distinction is often exploited by travel writers who then
position their readers as fellow-travellers, as opposed to the despised
tourists.
Chapter Nine, by Justine Coupland and Nikolas Coupland, concludes the volume
with a look at how the dialogically developed stance, in relation to body
weight in a geriatric setting and in women’s magazines, indexes and reinforces
the role of the body as a ‘moral site’ (229). By highlighting the dialogic
nature of stancetaking, Coupland and Coupland show that authorial stances are
not always, and not only, the product of individuals’ subjectivities but can,
and often are, made for them. The authors quote, for example, medical
discourse, which has often been referred to as ‘asymmetrical’, realized in
acts of ‘speaking for’ rather that ‘speaking with’ the patient. They then
refer to the discourse of magazine features relating, in this case, to issues
of weight and body shape issues. This discourse, Coupland and Coupland argue,
is distinctive in the ways it attributes institutional stances to laypeople
(the magazine readers) in relation to their body weight and body shape. This,
the authors argue, is essential to the maintenance and dissemination of
normative ideologies, in particular, with regard to ageing and the body.
EVALUATION
In 1981, Lyons (1981) wrote that, as far as works written in English were
concerned, ‘the vast majority of them [were] seriously flawed, from a
theoretical point of view, by their failure to give due weight to [the notions
of modality, subjectivity, and locutionary agency] and their interdependence’
(235-236). This, he argued, was mainly due to an ‘intellectualist prejudice
that language is essentially an instrument for the expression of propositional
thought’ (236).
Fortunately, things have change since then and what might be termed the
‘subjective function of language’ has been receiving considerable attention.
The encoding of ‘speaker’s positionality’ vis-à-vis his/her utterance, its
form and content, and in relation to his/her real or potential audience, has
been explored not only in semantics but also in pragmatics and discourse
studies. According to each particular researcher’s priorities and theoretical
orientation, this has resulted in different terminology reflecting the
particular aspect of subjectivity being investigated. However, from whichever
point of view one wishes to approach it, one thing is clear: in language,
speaker’s positionality is found everywhere. Indeed, language seems to be
specifically designed to encode it.
This volume refers to encodings of speakers’ positionality as ‘stance’ and
‘stancetaking’. As Jaffe explains, stancetaking refers to ‘taking up a
position with respect to the form and content of one’s utterance’ (3). Jaffe
clearly acknowledges that the linguistic encoding of stance is not new.
Most of the volume’s contributions also benefit greatly from ethnographic and
anthropological approaches, which is why they are likely to be appreciated by
a public with interests beyond linguistics and sociolinguistics. What the
contributors to this volume clearly show is how central of a process
stancetaking is in the formation, maintenance, and transmission of individual
and communal identity. Furthermore, stancetaking is clearly shown to be
related to concepts such as power, ideology, and style. Consequently, the
research presented in this volume will be of interest not only to
sociolinguists, but also, in this reviewer’s opinion, to literary scholars,
discourse-analysts, anthropologists and psychologists. All readers will
certainly appreciate the clarity with which arguments are made and will find
inspiration to further test the ideas and methodologies put forward.
Another strength of this volume is the range of data it uses: travelogues in
British newspapers, everyday monolingual and bilingual talk in English as well
as other languages, archival material such as letters written by African
Christian missionaries in the nineteenth century, and recorded interactions
and interviews. This certainly strengthens the arguments being made and
clearly demonstrates the wide applicability of a sociolinguistic approach to
stancetaking. All contributors to the volume are experts in their own fields
and have long histories of dealing with their respective topics. However, each
contribution is up-to-date, both in terms of progress in the field and the
latest developments put forth by each researcher. As such, this collection can
work well as an introduction to what, for some, might be a new area of
interest, as well as a way of staying abreast of leading researchers’ current
thoughts on issues such as stance and individual style.
Of all the very good essays in this volume, one that particularly stands out
(at least in this reviewer’s opinion) is Jaworski and Thurlow’s essay on
elitist stance in newspaper travel articles. Although the analytic tools they
employ are neither new nor particularly sophisticated, their work clearly
illustrates how stancetaking and ideology can be fruitfully uncovered and
explored in texts to which most readers will have been exposed at one point or
another. Thus, this chapter can be used as a ‘how to’ guide by instructors,
more experienced researchers, and students alike.
In conclusion, this is an excellent book which, by providing a unifying
concept, offers a very interesting and useful methodology for looking at
speakers’ individuality or ‘self’. Written with clear language and with a
plethora of examples, it is likely to be a seminal work for years to come.
REFERENCES
Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Lyons, John. 1981. Language, Meaning & Context. London: Fontana.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Simone C.Bacchini is Social Sciences Curator at The British Library. He has
obtained a PhD in Linguistics. His thesis was on the linguistic encoding of
the experience of bodily pain in chronic illness. His interests include
sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, health communication, and systemic
functional grammar. He is currently working on ageist discourse in Italian
political discourse.
Jan 08
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
AUTHOR: Alan Partington
AUTHOR: Alison Duguid
AUTHOR: Charlotte Taylor
TITLE: Patterns and Meanings in Discourse
SUBTITLE: Theory and practice in corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS)
SERIES TITLE: Studies in Corpus Linguistics 55
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2013
REVIEWER: Alessia Bianchini, Università degli Studi di Pavia
SUMMARY
”Patterns and Meaning in Discourse. Theory and Practice in Corpus-assisted
Discourse Studies (CADS)” aims to provide researchers and students interested
in Corpus Linguistics (CL) with a variety of methodologies that can be applied
successfully to discourse analysis. Each chapter of the book presents a case
study that delves into a particular topic/area of CADS; some of the chapters
(namely Chapters Four, Five, Six, Nine, Ten and Eleven) feature reworked
articles and contributions the authors have published in the last decade on
the topic of CADS, however, since CL has matured considerably in the last
years, materials and data from previous works here have been updated and
extended as well.
The Introduction gives a useful outline of the book, describing its structure
and, most importantly, presenting its theoretical premise and its aim. The
research rests on the assumption that human language seems to behave according
to the Sinclairian ”idiom vs. open choice theory” (Sinclair 1996; 1998),
which the authors argue is in fact the expression of specific cognitive/mental
processes. Assuming this theoretical premise, the authors then aim to prove
that communicative discourse is organized along these same lines; the
following chapters of the book, each of which dedicates itself to a case
study, investigate the instantiation of the aforementioned hypothesis.
Furthermore, the Introduction also gives a brief overview of CL and CADS,
defining the former as ”that set of studies into the form and/or function of
language which incorporate the use of computerized corpora in their analysis”
(p. 5) and the latter as “that set of studies into the form and/or function of
language as communicative discourse which incorporate the use of computerized
corpora in their analysis” (p. 10). Finally, it presents the set of corpora
on which the research is based (mainly the Siena-Bologna Modern Diachronic
Corpus, available through the Sketch Engine interface, Kilgarriff, Rychly,
Smrz, Tugwell 2004) and the WordSmith Tool (Scott 2008) employed to work the
corpora. All corpora, resources and software used in the book are accurately
listed in the Appendix.
Chapter One focuses on the aforementioned Sinclairian Theory. The authors
present both the ”idiom principle” and the ”open-choice principle” (known
as ”phraseological tendency” and ”terminological tendency”, in Sinclair’s
words, Sinclair 1996, 2004): the former refers to the idea that language (and
therefore discourse) is largely composed by (semi) preconstituted blocks of
lexical items (e.g. multi-words units, schemas, templates, …), going from
collocations such as ”roaring fire” to set phrases such as ”as a matter of
fact”; the latter refers instead to the ability of language to generate new
meanings from pre-existing rules. Based on Sinclair’s theory, the authors
argue that language organization behaves according to the interaction of these
two principles. Moreover, they sustain that the idiom principle and the
open-choice principle parallel two cognitive/psychological processes: the
first process makes it possible for human beings to learn to behave socially
through the imitation of acquainted social behaviors (Hoey’s “Lexical Priming
Theory”, which is another important reference point for this book, extends
this hypothesis to the linguistic field, Hoey 2005); the second process
instead concerns the role of memory in learning, insisting that human beings
tend to recall regularities (or ”patterns”) in events and use them to make
predictions and forecasts. Note that, as clearly stated by the authors, the
debate over whether language is a form of cognitive processing or whether it
is the other way around is beyond the scope of the book (p. 30); instead, its
aim is to test the hypothesis that language organization and cognitive
processing share some similarities.
Chapter Two focuses on evaluative discourse (Hunston 2010) and presents the
first case study of the book, which is on using concordance evidence to
identify hidden evaluative polarity and evaluative prosody (also known as
”semantic prosody”, Sinclair 1987, 1991; Louw 1993, 2000; Stewart 2010,
among others, or ”discourse prosody”, Tognini-Bonelli 2001; Stubbs 2001).
The corpus-based research shows how lexical elements expressing a positive or
negative polarity may be nested and embedded (and therefore, not immediately
obvious) within preconstructed phrases, as well as how preconstructed phrases
expressing polarity may have their evaluative value altered when in
combination with certain discourse structures. The case study shows how
extracting concordances for a certain target item (e.g. ”of some
stature/standing”, p. 48, ”end up” + [preposition] + place, p. 59) may be
useful to identify hidden evaluative meanings. The chapter ends with a section
on ”Suggestions for Further Research”, in which the authors challenge the
readers with a couple exercises that may be useful to get acquainted with the
methodology illustrated.
Chapter Three reinforces the points raised in Chapter Two: evaluative items
interact in the text; and CADS methodologies may be useful to shed light on
this interaction. Chapter Three’s case study focuses on an analysis of the
notion of ”control”; as it emerges from the corpus-based inquiry, usually
the concept of control (or of lack of control) conveys an evaluative polarity,
even if the lexical item ”control” does not actually appear in the text.
Moreover, the examination of a variety of lexical items (e.g. ”set in”,
”sit through”, ”orchestrate” and ”true feelings”, among others) shows
that what seems to be crucial to the realization of a certain evaluative value
is in fact the speaker’s point of view, since positive or negative evaluation
are found according to ”the extent to which the speaker or writer is in
control of events” (p. 94).
In the subsequent Chapters, Four, Five and Six, the authors present evidence
of how writers and speakers can subvert the regularities in language (and
therefore the arisen expectations) by means of specific rhetorical figures,
namely: irony, metaphor and figurative expressions, and the so-called
”creative collocational inappropriateness”, which is the process by which
collocational expectations are denied by the unusual co-occurrence of certain
items (e.g. ”deliberately love this girl”, where “deliberately” collocates
unexpectedly with a positive entity, ”love”).
Chapter Seven presents a cross-linguistic case study about the representation
of migrants in the Italian and English press (Gabrielatos and Baker 2008;
Taylor 2009). In line with the aim of the book, a specific CADS methodology is
applied to the topic. The research presented in the chapter is structured as
follows: in the first phase, items conveying a racist or xenophobic meaning
are concordanced to analyze how they appear in the newspapers; in the second
phase, a few specific items (namely: ”refugees”, ”asylum seekers”,
”immigrants” and ”migrants”, with their Italian equivalent) are thoroughly
investigated; finally, the outcomes of the linguistic research are compared
with ”real-world” statistical data in order to identify any mismatch between
the number of migrants per country and the related amount of media attention.
Again, the chapter concludes by providing readers with a series of exercises.
Chapters Eight and Nine come back to the evaluation topic, but this time the
attention is focused on spoken discourse. Chapter Eight begins giving an
overview of studies based on corpora of spoken language and then presents a
couple of related case studies, each of which concerns a peculiar type of
interaction, conflict. In the authors’ opinion, in fact, some of the most
interesting types of discourse are those in which participants find themselves
in an adversarial situation, since here, the strategic use of language can be
best studied (Montgomery 2007). As for the case studies, Chapter Eight
presents a CADS approach to J. W. Bush and Obama’s press conference briefings,
and to the Hutton Inquiry. Chapter Nine still focuses on conflict, but it
specifically delves into the phenomenon of (im)politeness. First, an overview
of CL approaches to (im)politeness is given (Watts, Ide and Elich 1992), and
then, as a case study, three different institutional discourse types (namely,
a subset from the House of Commons debates; the Hutton Inquiry; a subset from
the BBC TV show ”Breakfast with Frost”) are presented in order to show how
CADS’ approach to (im)politeness proves to be a useful tool to unmask
deliberate (yet hidden) mocking strategies. Both Chapters Eight and Chapter
Nine conclude with a ”Suggestions for Further Research” section as well.
Chapters Ten and Eleven respectively introduce and focus on ”modern
diachronic CADS” (MD-CADS), a particular subfield of CADS which focuses on
diachrony. Although the preferential use of CADS’ methods is the analysis of
synchronic data, a diachronic approach to discourse seems to be worthy of
attention since it may unveil interesting linguistic changes over (brief
periods of) time. To serve its scope, MD-CADS needs ”ad hoc” corpora to be
as comparable as possible. As for the case studies illustrated in Chapters Ten
and Eleven, they are based on SiBol and Port corpora, which comprehensively
contain newspaper texts from 1993, 2005 and 2010. The case study in Chapter
Ten aims to underline some (general) diachronic variation in the English
language/discourse within the period 1993-2010 (e.g. the apparent increase in
the salience of the first personal pronoun ”I”, at the expense of other
personal pronouns). Chapter Eleven presents two case studies: the first one
focuses on how the concept of antisemitism is expressed in the press; and the
second one focuses on the use of the items ”boy/girl”.
The last chapter of the book is a conclusion that sums up the most relevant
issues encountered in previous chapters.
Finally, the book features a complete bibliography and a useful author index.
EVALUATION
The purpose of ”Patterns and Meaning in Discourse. Theory and Practice in
Corpus-assisted Discourse Studies (CADS)” is to provide readers interested in
CL with a series of methodologies that may be useful for the analysis of
language and, in particular, of discourse. More precisely, the aim of the book
is to show, through a collection of specific case studies, “the eclecticism”
(p. 328) and the potential of CADS research. This purpose is achieved, since
the authors were able to provide a broad overview of the possible applications
of CADS methodologies. Additionally, as a further product of this area of
research, each case study illustrated in the book provides data, ideas and
considerations that are both linguistic and extra-linguistic in nature.
As the book is designed to offer a wide-ranging introduction to corpus
techniques, one of the main considerations emerging from it is the necessity
of ”tailoring the research procedure to the particular researches questions
and aims” (p. 328). In fact, what is well-pointed out by this variegated work
is that the researcher should always keep in mind that there is no “best
methodology” per se, but that the most suitable procedure has to be chosen
depending on the goal of the research itself.
Also, this work draws attention to the need for an integrated approach to
discourse analysis. The case studies presented in fact show the importance of
the comparison of linguistic data and extra-linguistic data (e.g. the case
illustrated in Chapter Seven, dedicated to the representation of migrants and
in Chapters Ten and Eleven, concerning the concept of antisemitism and
gender), since language is mainly a social factor. Moreover, the authors
underline the importance of taking into account well-known issues from other
linguistic fields, such as translation in the case of cross-linguistic CADS.
As for the book’s organization, its structure is very linear and consistent.
The Introduction provides the reader with a useful overview of the topics that
will be covered in the following chapters, and Chapter Twelve, devoted to the
conclusions, summarizes the main points of the research in a concise yet
effective way. Also, although each chapter of the book is in fact research in
its own right, the book does not lose its internal coherence.
REFERENCES
Gabrielatos C. and Baker P. 2008. ”Fleeing, sneaking, flooding: A corpus
analysis of discursive constructions of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK
press (1996-2005)”. Journal of English Linguistics 36(1): 5-38.
Hoey M. 2005. ”Lexical Priming: A New Theory of Words and Language”. London:
Routledge.
Hunston S. 2010. ”Corpus Approaches to Evaluation: Phraseology and Evaluative
Language”. London: Routledge.
Kilgarriff A., Rychly P., Smrz P., Tugwell D. 2004. ”The Sketch Engine”. In
”Proc. EURALEX 2004, Lorient, France”, pp 105-116.
Louw W. 2000. ”Contextual prosodic theory: Bringing semantic prosodies into
life”. In C. Heffer and H. Staunton (eds.), ”Words in Context” 48-95.
Birmingham: Univ. of Birmingham.
Montgomery M. 2007. ”The Discourse of Broadcast News: A Linguistic
Approach”. London: Routledge.
Sinclair J. 1996. ”The search for units of meaning”. Textus 9(1): 75-106.
Sinclair J. 1997. ”The nature of evidence”. In J. Sinclair (ed.), “Looking
Up”, 150-159. London: Routledge.
Sinclair J. 1998. The lexical item. In ”Contrastive Lexical Semantics”, E.
Weigand (ed.), 1-24. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sinclair J. 2004. ”Trust the text: Language, Corpus and Discourse”. London:
Routledge.
Stewart D. 2010. ”Semantic Prosody: A Critical Evaluation”. London:
Routledge.
Stubbs M. 2001. ”Words and Phrases: Corpus Studies of Lexical Semantics”.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Taylor C. 2009. ”The representation of immigrants in the Italian press”.
CirCap Occasional Papers 21. Siena: University of Siena.
Tognini-Bonelli E. 2001. ”Corpus Linguistics at Work”. Amsterdam: John
Benjamin.
Watts R., Ide S. and Ehlich K. 1992. Politeness in Language: Studies in its
History, Theory and Practice. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Alessia Bianchini is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Pavia
(Italy). Her research interests include Corpus Linguistics and Computational
Linguistics and particularly the interface syntax-semantics.
Oct 12
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
EDITOR: Ruth Wodak
EDITOR: John E. Richardson
TITLE: Analysing Fascist Discourse
SUBTITLE: European Fascism in Talk and Text
SERIES TITLE: Routledge Critical Studies in Discourse
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2012
REVIEWER: Rubén Moralejo, Universidade de Vigo
SUMMARY
This volume, edited by Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson, contains a series of
studies which shed light on the continuities and discontinuities of European
fascist discourse. Within the context of European politics, extreme right-wing
populism is (re)presented as an alternative to the political, social and
economic impasse. It seems necessary, from a discourse-analytical perspective,
to critically approach their talk and text in order to determine whether a
fascist “ideological core” (5) still constitutes such contemporary political
practices and by which means the concrete historical conditions mediate a
process of discursive recontextualisation.
Wodak and Richardson set up the main goals as well as the general theoretical
and critical point of departure of the volume in “European Fascism in Talk and
Text — Introduction”. One of the first questions they ask has to do with the
difficulty in reaching an agreement regarding a definition of fascism. Despite
the apparent consensus among historians — Griffin’s definition as
“palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism” (1998:13) is considered the most
accurate and encompassing — a brief look into the literature shows that a
critical, context-sensitive approach constitutes a more appropriate research
strategy. One of the functions of (Critical) Discourse Studies is to situate a
particular text (or talk) in dialectical relation to other texts and other
social phenomena; that is, to contextualise it. However, for this process of
reinterpretation to function critically, its focus cannot be reduced to
synchronic, isolated, concrete social facts. On the contrary: one of the main
epistemological assumptions of the authors is that processes of social
transformation are in part processes of discursive transformation. They can be
analysed in terms of chains of events which are usually involved in a struggle
for social hegemony. Thus, the only way to give account of such changes is by
adopting a historical-diachronic perspective that paves the way for conducting
a longitudinal, comparative study that considers intertextuality and
interdiscursivity as one of the main loci of such struggle.
In the second chapter, “Radical Right Discourse Contra State-Based
Authoritarian Populism: Neoliberalism, Identity and Exclusion after the
Crisis”, Daniel Woodley argues that when revisionist historiography considers
fascism as a “totalitarian religion” (17) there is no space left for
envisioning the reciprocal relationship between right-wing populism and
neoliberalism. This misleading characterisation is founded on an idealised
notion of ideology which considers it a separate, content-based set of
beliefs, arguments and ideas that exist apart from the material conditions
that in part determine the social reality of fascist discourse. Woodley’s aim
consists of distancing himself from this academic obfuscation by examining the
precise social function of extreme right-wing populism in the context of the
current global socialisation of capitalist production as well as its inherent
class antagonism. The definition of fascism provided by the author considers
its capitalist-rooted instrumentality, in terms of how both the political and
the corporate elites merge in the form of a dictatorship appealing to
“fetishized identity-driven consumption” (23). These two apparently distinct
positions, neoliberalism and neoconservatism, operate reciprocally; they are
both counterparts, political commodities that collaborate with each other in
constituting and securing the effective functioning of capitalist ideology.
In “Italian Post-war Neo-Fascism: Three Paths, One Mission?” (chapter 3),
Tamir Bar-On focuses on the rise of three neo-fascist — or “revolutionary
right-wing” (43) — strategies in post-war Italy: the creation or adoption of
the institutional form of the party (parliamentary neo-fascism); organising
and engaging in political practices outside the scope of institutionalised
politics (extra-parliamentary neo-fascism); and the most recent “metapolitical
neo-fascism” (45), which withdraws from practices directed at gaining
immediate access to power in favour of a more cultural, theoretical approach.
Such strategies are not mutually exclusive: they complement each other. They
find their unifying principle in undertaking the eradication of liberal
democracy and multiculturalism. Hence, it is in this sense of radical
transformation where Bar-On identifies the revolutionary character of fascism.
A further line of reasoning for the latter is provided by the author when he
mentions the increased Europeanism present in contemporary fascist discourses,
certifying the trans-national character of their future prospects. It is
mainly via the parliamentary and the metapolitical paths that fascism
(re)organised itself in Italy after the War; the result of a tactical
displacement from the risky (and socially repudiated) directness of the
violent revolt to the legitimising frameworks of liberal democracy and the
European intelligentsia.
In chapter 4, “The Reception of Antisemitic Imagery in Nazi Germany and
Popular Opinion — Lessons for Today” Andreas Musolff assesses the extent to
which the ‘parasite’ metaphor underlying Nazi anti-Semitic discourse impelled
identification or acknowledgment within German popular discourse. The author
embraces the interdisciplinary scope provided by Discourse-oriented Metaphor
Analysis, which encompasses Cognitive Metaphor Analysis, Critical Discourse
Analysis and Discourse History. Metaphors call forth narrative and
argumentative scenarios by means of which certain entities are signalled as
unmarked, whereas others receive particular “socioethical evaluations” (58).
These may, according to historical and discursive contexts, crystallise and
function as action-guiding ‘tenets’. In the case of the ‘parasite’ metaphor, a
schema of infection-crisis-therapy is brought about, yet transposed to Nazi
anti-Semitic imagery: the Jewish race is portrayed as the enemy parasitizing
the German body, the cause of the ‘illness’; as a precondition to the healing
process, the parasite has to be annihilated. Musolff shows how the use of this
metaphor was central to Nazi discourse from the very first moments of the
Third Reich. In fact, the ‘Jew-parasite’ core of the metaphor has survived
through the years. However, he also highlights the presence of discontinuities
concerning the therapy-through-parasite-annihilation scenario, which has been
subjected to variation depending not only on changes in the sociopolitical
context but also in relation to the degree of acceptability granted by the
public.
According to Jakob Engel and Ruth Wodak (“‘Calculated ambivalence’ and
Holocaust Denial in Austria”), since the end of World War II, Austria has
undergone a process of identity re-formation that has been characterised by
the obfuscation of its involvement in the genocide against the Jews. This
process has been expressed in Postwar Austrian legislation through the
approval of the Verbotsgesetz (the prohibition law). Using a
Discourse-Historical Approach, the authors inquire into the controversy around
a series of public interventions made by two Austrian right-wing politicians
from the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria), John
Gudenus and Barbara Rosenkranz. Their denial of the Holocaust comprises
“strategies of positive self- and negative other- presentation” and
“strategies of justification and legitimation” (78). The authors focus on
three discursive strategies: referential, predicational, and justificatory
strategies. One of the conclusions they draw refers to the notion of
calculated ambivalence, a dispositive intended to convey a twofold meaning to
different audiences by means of the same utterance. The calculated ambivalence
evidenced in the discourse of Gudenus and Rosenkranz is strategically
construed to avoid the transgression of the Verbotsgesetz — and thus avoid
legal punishment — and to effectively transgress it by means of justifying
and reproducing, although in an ‘encrypted’, ambivalent manner, the denial of
the Holocaust.
In “German Postwar Discourse of the Extreme and Populist Right”, by Claudia
Posch, Maria Stopfner and Manfred Kienpointner, the search for an
all-encompassing definition of fascism is raised again. They claim that the
available, most widely accepted definitions may come in handy when trying to
categorise empirical data as manifestations of fascist thought and propaganda.
They give an overview of German-speaking countries’ history of extreme
right-wing parties, and collect a corpus of texts recently broadcast in
different media. This diachronic-historical contextualisation aids in
identifying significant continuities or discontinuities among the discourses
analysed. Posch, Stopfner and Kienpointner embrace a multifaceted theoretical
framework: they combine Habermas’ Theory of Argumentation, New Rhetoric,
Critical Discourse Analysis and Pragma-Dialectics. They attend to significant
instances of fascist persuasive discourse and the strategic devices they
comprise. Their analysis points to three distinct strategies of persuasion
that have developed within fascist discourse in light of the context of legal
and political conditions that constrain its more transparent manifestations:
the strategic use of indirectness; of metaphor; and of argument schemes that
may revolve around a causal fallacy. In the conclusion, the authors appeal to
a broadening of the scope of the investigation as well as the necessity to
build a more representative corpus.
Derrin Pinto, in “Education and Etiquette: Behaviour Formation in Fascist
Spain”, describes the historical context of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain as
a regime that put ideological investment in the domain of education and the
instilling of the notion of etiquette. This concept was eventually granted
the status of a curricular component, and served the regime as a means to
produce and maintain a particular social configuration. Pinto relies on a
corpus of 33 Spanish textbooks published during the period, related to the
teaching of manners and politeness. His analysis focuses on two main features:
the way ideology is embodied and constructed in terms of its particular
contents, and the concrete discursive devices intended for legitimation and
control. He contends that the texts evidence an ideology depicting a
predilection for National Catholicism (values), high society and an urban,
patriarchal way-of-life (membership), and an absolute respect for authority
(activities and norms) based upon the realisation of personal and social
objectives (goals). Pinto’s analysis shows how the expressions and mechanisms
of persuasive discourse functioned as an ideological tool for legitimation, as
in the case of the recurrent use of the deontic modality to communicate a
sense of duty and obligation. He also explores the continuities and
discontinuities of this ideology regarding contemporary Spanish textbooks.
Cristina Marinho and Michael Billig’s “The CDS-PP and the Portuguese
Parliament’s Annual Celebration of the 1974 Revolution: Ambivalence and
Avoidance in the Construction of the Fascist Past” brings into focus the
insuperable distance evidenced in the simultaneous articulation in discourse
of the rhetorical surface and the ideological depth — calculated ambivalence
that sustains a democratic façade while simultaneously addressing to the ‘old’
fascist ideological core. Through an analysis of parliamentary speeches of the
Portuguese Centro Democrático e Social Partido Popular (Social and Democratic
Centre Popular Party) which were given at annual commemorations of the 1974
Revolução dos Cravos, they show how this discursive duplicity manifests in a
context-dependent fashion and, as they conclude, how the
parliamentary-annual-celebration setting itself is a precondition for such
ambivalence to function effectively.
The next chapter (“Continuities of Fascist Discourses, Discontinuities of
Extreme-Right Political Actors?: Overt and Covert Anti-Semitism in the
Contemporary French Radical Right”) aims at dismantling some implications of
the discontinuity theory: the diachronically-evidenced idea that, given the
transformation within French political discourses with regard to the
non-acceptability of anti-Semitism, extreme-right discourses have withdrawn
from signalling the Jew as the ultimate antagonist, favouring other new
“ethnic tensions” (163). Brigitte Beauzamy critically analyses contemporary
radical-right anti-Semitic discourses, such as those of Le Pen’s party, Front
National, and the Nouvelle Droite, as well as the discourse of Kemi Seba, a
French Afrocentric activist. She contends that there is a maintenance of the
‘old’ fascist nucleus regarding anti-Semitism, of which one significant
instance can be found in the discourse of Kemi Seba. This discursive
continuity leads, according to Beauzamy, to the reaffirmation of the
traditional anti-Semitic ideology.
John E. Richardson’s chapter “Racial Populism in British Fascist Discourse:
The Case of COMBAT and the British National Party (1960-1967)” deals with old
and contemporary British fascism. The author proposes a framework informed by
Critical Discourse Analysis and the Discourse-Historical Approach, especially
regarding the latter’s conceptualisation of context as comprising four
interconnected levels, which is crucial for the task of exposing the
continuities and discontinuities of certain semiotic entities within
discourse. Richardson focuses on the British National Party’s (BNP)
anti-Semitic discourse. After offering a diachronic outline of the main
strategies that can be found in British fascist discourse, Richardson
concludes that, despite having abandoned univocal allusions to anti-Semitism,
the discourse of the BNP still retains the traditional British fascist
ideological core. The difference is that contemporary discourses rely on a
recontextualisation that avoids any explicit reference to ‘old’ fascism
(mostly due to legal constraint and a self-interest for gaining adepts), on
the one hand, and rehabilitates the same traditional fascism, on the other.
“Variations on a Theme: The Jewish ‘Other’ in Old and New Antisemitic Media
Discourses in Hungary in the 1940s and in 2011,” by András Kovács and Anna
Szilágyi, considers the controversy that sprouted as a consequence of the
appearance of extreme-right organisations in European post-Communist
countries. Specifically, the authors focus on Hungarian media discourses.
Determining whether these new political forces consist of just another
variation of generic fascism (continuity) or constitute a singular, genuine
political movement in its own right (discontinuity) has proved unsatisfactory.
One of the possible continuities is the professed anti-Semitism of the current
Hungarian extreme right. This connection is confirmed in their analysis, which
distinguishes the main patterns of anti-Semitic discourses displayed in two
Hungarian newspapers published during the 1940s. They look for similar
discursive patterns in the case of two Hungarian news portals dating from
2011. To support their claim that ‘old’ fascist patterns continue to appear in
the discourses of current extreme-right media, they examine discursive
strategies of othering that appear to coincide in both cases: Jews are
referred to as the relevant other, and the stereotypes employed in depicting
the other along with the argumentation schemes at work — such as the
“victim-victimiser reversal” (209) — are recurrent in both historical
moments. However, Kovács and Szilágyi also point out some significant
differences. For example, the Jewish ‘menace’ is now regarded not so much as
being confined to the Hungarian borders as constituting a global threat.
Finally, the authors also discuss the function of anti-Semitic discourse:
whereas it served traditional fascism as a compelling means for mass
mobilisation, nowadays it works as a medium to foster group identity.
“The Return of the Ukrainian Far Right: The Case of VO Svoboda” deals with the
Ukrainian case. Per Anders Rudling studies the history of far-right political
movements in the country, attending not only to the ideological, political
aspects evidenced in their behaviour but also to the conditions that cleared
the way for their rise and propagation. He argues that the current Ukrainian
situation is the result of a strategy of rehabilitation of far-right ideology.
This development was marked by the neo-fascist instrumentation of history: the
glorification of certain, salient historical characters or events for both
legitimating its existence and mobilising its audience. Such a strategy was
not so much enacted within the political sphere but primarily fulfilled by the
far-right Ukrainian intelligentsia, i.e. through the work of revisionist
historians who have constructed and theorised a national cosmology that relies
on the self-victimisation of Ukrainian fascists.
In “New Times, Old Ideologies? Recontextualisations of Radical Right Thought
in Post-Communist Romania,” Irina Diana Mădroane analyses the multiple layers
of meaning implied in contemporary, extreme-right Romanian discourses.
Mădroane contends that, given the on-going process of fascist rehabilitation
in Romania, these meanings are intentionally administered as part of the
process. The author discusses the post-Communist context and the appearance of
the New Right as the main representative of the increasing radical right
manifestations in the country. This political movement is mainly informed by
the Legionary doctrine. Mădroane’s framework comprises Critical Discourse
Analysis and the Discourse Historical Approach, and she focuses on the ways in
which intertextuality and interdiscursivity may serve to evidence a process of
discursive recontextualisation. An analysis of a series of texts appearing on
the New Right’s website shows that the process of identity reshaping is
sustained by three discursively-mediated strategies: an ultra-nationalist
rhetoric indebted to the Legionary mythology, discursive strategies of
exclusion and rejection of the threatening Others, and strategies of
transformation, which consist in the self-characterisation of the movement in
messianic terms.
In the next section, Anton Shekhovtsov (“European Far-Right Music and Its
Enemy”) considers the extreme right music scene. He specifically looks into
the construction of the Enemy and the discursive resources mobilised to that
end within the lyrics of various White Power songs. Shekhovtsov claims that
the sources of inspiration of White Power music coincide with those of some
extreme right political movements. For example, the Jew is usually portrayed
as the pivotal element between the Other and the System. The study evidences
the narrow relationship between White Power music and its political
counterpart, arguing that far-right music should not be regarded as a ‘soft’
manifestation of extreme right ideology. On the contrary, its role as an
inherent element of the ultra-nationalist political expression must not be
underestimated.
The concluding chapter, “The Branding of European Nationalism: Perpetuation
and Novelty in Racist Symbolism”, is by Mark McGlashan. Embracing a Discourse
Historical Approach, he considers the significant rhetorical features that can
be found in the symbolic practices of several political parties. The notion of
political branding is foregrounded as a multimodal, analytic tool that may be
helpful in identifying the “symbolic realisations of racism” (299) within the
logos of European nationalist parties. McGlashan presents several case studies
from different national contexts. He points to the continuities between
extreme-right discourses and the visual symbolism involved in the branding
strategies of political organisations. Not only do the logos point to similar
referents, but they are also strategically constructed by means of similar
procedures.
EVALUATION
This volume can be regarded as a contribution to the on-going trend in
Discourse Studies which focuses on the dynamics between language and other
significant social phenomena. What is distinctive about this study is its
interdisciplinary approach to the political discourses of the new European
extreme right. No other systematic analysis is currently available in which
such a comprehensive survey of the historical dynamics involving contemporary
(neo)fascist discourse is provided — with the exception of another volume
recently published of which Ruth Wodak is also one of the editors (Wodak,
Khosravinik & Mral 2013).
The combination of methodologies involving critical discourse analysis (CDA —
Fairclough 1995, 2001) and the discourse-historical approach (DHA — Reisigl
& Wodak 2009) responds to the necessity of theorising the context — that is,
to integrate the context-sensitivity potential of DHA into the general
framework of CDA. This allows the authors to fulfil their goal of determining
continuities and discontinuities regarding a fascist discursive nucleus and
its contemporary manifestations by means of comparative diachronic case
studies. They find that this nucleus has survived the passage of time, whilst
some of its particular forms are highly context-dependent and vary in
different ways.
Given their consensus on the importance of context in approaching discourse,
the authors offer more or less exhaustive accounts of the historical
conditions of the countries involved. This, along with the technical and
theoretical sections, amounts to a widening of the potential audience for the
volume, which already includes researchers engaged in the academic study of
language, and also scholars and students interested in contemporary politics.
Certain common orientations can be found in the book: the aforementioned
theoretical and methodological assumptions from which the case studies depart,
their shared purpose of attending to the continuities and discontinuities of
the discourses analysed and the critical perspective they adopt. The fact that
almost every chapter is devoted to a different European country contributes to
a general picture of far-right movements in present time. The results of some
case studies presented in the book show how European far-right rhetoric is
shifting from a nationalist to a more trans-national scope. The diversity of
the case studies is helpful in perceiving the different modalities of the
symbolic practices as well as the ways in which they intertwine and act
simultaneously in the process of (re)production of the symbolic order.
The book was not conceived as a theoretically oriented work. Nonetheless, a
more detailed account of some notions could have been useful. For instance,
the idea that there is a core ideology seems to be broadly accepted, and even
though there is much discussion about the difficulty of defining fascism and
the idiosyncratic aspects involved in the very gesture of defining it,
significant sources that could have been relevant concerning this issue are
not discussed or just circumstantially mentioned (e.g. Thompson 1984 and Žižek
1989 onwards). Another aspect related to ideology involves the implicit
idealisation of democracy that has a twofold function: because it works as the
point of neutralisation of ideology, it stands for a zero-level from which the
other discourses are characterised.
For future research on political discourse and the current status of the
European far right, this volume stands out as a referent inasmuch as it
provides readers with a wide-ranging perspective on the discursive resources
on which right-wing political forces rely in pursuing their goals. A possible
continuation of this study could be to approach these discourses not just as
instances of (neo)fascist ideology that threaten the foundations of today’s
democracy but, conversely, as complementary social phenomena that function
within the limits of a common (globalised) ideological framework. An
exceptional illustration of this point is provided in Pinto’s chapter. He sets
up a preliminary comparative study involving Civics textbooks under Franco and
current Education for Citizenship manuals, concluding that “the two
contemporary books appear to employ many of the same linguistic devices with
regard to the discourse structure and the mechanisms of legitimation and
control that were found to be recurring in the Franco texts” (139). Moreover,
the only significant difference he finds between these two texts has to do
with the rhetoric of equality: “imbalanced relations of power, similar to
those of the past, continue to exist” (140). How is it, then, that under the
European allegedly-democratic framework and beside decades of legislation and
social non-acceptability, fascism still thrives as a mobilising force? This
apparent contradiction fades away once the complementarity between democratic
and fascist discourses as well as their function under the capitalist global
social order are acknowledged.
REFERENCES
Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis. Boston: Addison Wesley.
Fairclough, Norman. 2001. Language and Power (2nd edition). London: Longman.
Griffin, Roger (ed.). 1998. International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the
New Consensus. London: Arnold.
Reisigl, Martin & Ruth Wodak. 2009. The discourse historical approach. In Ruth
Wodak & Michael Meyer (eds.). Methods for Critical Discourse Analysis. London:
Sage. 87-121.
Thompson, John B. 1984. Studies in the Theory of Ideology. Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press.
Wodak Ruth, Majid Khosravinik & Brigitte Mral (eds.). 2013. Right-Wing
Populism in Europe. Discourse and Politics. London: Bloomsbury.
Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Rubén Moralejo is a doctoral student at the Universidade de Vigo (Spain).
Currently, he is doing research on the role ideology plays within the context
of (industrial) production. He focuses on the relation between language,
ideology and society. His research interests have to do with the critical
study of the ideology of capitalism.
Aug 26
ThE CLOwNbook review
EDITOR: Giuliana Garzone
EDITOR: Paola Catenaccio
EDITOR: Chiara Degano
TITLE: Genre Change in the Contemporary World
SUBTITLE: Short-term Diachronic Perspectives
SERIES TITLE: Linguistic Insights – Volume 159
PUBLISHER: Peter Lang AG
YEAR: 2012
REVIEWER: Pejman Habibie, University of Western Ontario
SUMMARY
“Genre Change in the Contemporary World” intends to shed light on the impact
of technological developments , innovations, and social trends having to do
with genre change and evolution in the contemporary world. The volume consists
of fifteen chapters including the opening one. After the opening chapter, the
remaining chapters are grouped into two sections thematically, “Academic and
Scientific Discourse” and “Institutional and Business Discourse”. “Notes on
Contributors” and a reference list constitute the concluding sections of the
volume.
Opening Chapter: Why Do Genres Change?
This chapter describes the overall framework of the book and provides the
reader with a theoretical lens for reading the subsequent chapters. In this
chapter, Giuliana Garzone enumerates textual, social, and cultural factors,
intertextual and interdiscursive interferences, ideological forces, external
pressures, and technological change as underlying factors that give rise to
genre variation and evolution within different discourse communities and in
different domains.
Section One: Academic and Scientific Discourse.
The chapters in this section address genre variation and evolution in academic
and scientific discourse.
Chapter Two: The Evolution of the Abstract as a Genre: 1988-2008. The Case of
Applied Linguistics.
This chapter presents a diachronic study of the evolution of the academic
genre of the abstract in applied linguistics over a period of twenty years.
Adopting a methodological approach that supports a combination of corpus and
discourse perspectives, Marina Bondi and Silvia Cavalieri explore variations
in communicative practices and linguistic features of this genre. The corpus
consists of 70 abstracts from 1988 and 70 abstracts from 2008 collected from
several refereed applied linguistics journals. The results indicate that
writers can be more explicit and objective when talking about their papers and
assessing their research rather than when talking about themselves, and that
locational patterns provide writers with a choice between personalization and
impersonality.
Chapter Three: A Diachronic Study of Genre Variation in Academic Publishing:
The Quarterly Journal of Economics (1965-2004).
This chapter presents an exploratory study of generic dynamics of an
English-medium journal. In this diachronic study, Davide S. Giannoni examines
a corpus of tables of contents and specimen texts published in an influential
economics journal over a span of forty years. The results indicate that
generic diversity has gradually disappeared over the years and highlight the
expanding gap between articles and all other minor contributions that enhance
the conversations of disciplines but are not cited.
Chapter Four: Poster Makers Should Think as Much about Show Business as
Science. The Case of Medical Posters in a Diachronic Perspective.
This chapter describes a diachronic study of the medical poster. Focusing on
the discourse of medical posters and indicators of marketization processes
within this discourse, Stefania M. Maci investigates the relationship between
the socio-financial context and medical discourse and the ways business
aspects of the health care system contribute to genre variation in this
discourse. The corpus consists of 2,638 posters presented at medical
conferences between 1980s-2000s. The results indicate a shift in the language
of medical posters from a narrative to a disjunctive mode. The presence of
this disjunctive mode necessitates adherence to the IMRD (introduction,
method, results, discussion) pattern of scientific discourse. Moreover, the
results reveal a change in the type of lexical items used in medical posters
and the frequent use of the adjective ‘economic’ in the 2000-2009 corpus,
indicating a shift of focus from statistical and empirical analysis in the
years 1980-1999 to socio-economic, socio-political, and socio-cultural issues
in the decade 2000-2009.
Chapter Five: Dialogic Monologues: Commencement Speeches as an Evolving Genre.
This chapter deals with commencement speeches delivered by high-caliber
academic figures at graduation ceremonies in North American universities as an
academic genre. Taking a diachronic perspective, Martin Solly examines generic
and rhetorical strategies and moves used in this genre since 1947. This
investigation indicates that monologues are becoming more and more dialogic
and interactive, and that the marketization of higher education and social
change have had a strong impact on the evolution of this genre. However, some
of the main features of this genre such as its framing in the academic context
have remained the same.
Chapter Six: Diachronic Evolution of Scientific Popularised Articles in Online
Newspapers: Critical Reflections on El Mundo.
This chapter presents the results of a diachronic study of the popularization
of scientific discourse in Spain. In this comparative study, Paula de Santiago
accounts for the evolution of web genres in online newspapers, comparing the
online supplement Salud and the online section Websalud of the Spanish
newspaper El Mundo. The focus of the study is on the form and functionality of
the articles analyzed. The results of this textual analysis are juxtaposed
with insights from three interviews with the Health Department of the
newspaper El Mundo as well. The findings indicate that social relevance is a
significant factor in topic selection and the hyper-textual and hyper-modal
capacities of the world wide web are used to a greater extent in the articles
specifically designed for cyber space.
Chapter Seven: A Diachronic Study of the Q&A Column in a Popular Science
Magazine
This chapter is about the diachronic evolution of science article
popularization in Taiwan over a span of thirty years. It indicates how the
relationship between genre users influences genres and their features over
time. Drawing on a model adopted from critical genre analysis (Bhatia 2004),
Min-Hsiu Liao describes Q&A columns and explains their social and historical
interactions with popular science development. The corpus consists of all the
correspondence in the Q&A column in Science Monthly from 1970-1999. The study
concludes that changes at textual, institutional, and social levels are the
result of the interaction among these layers of practice and do not
necessarily follow a top down or a bottom up pattern.
Section Two: Institutional and Business Discourse.
The chapters in this section address genre variation and evolution in
institutional and business discourse.
Chapter Eight: FAO’s Food Insecurity Reports: An Evolving Genre.
This chapter reports on a diachronic study of the Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) reports on the State of Food Insecurity (SOFI) from
1999-2009. Adopting a combination of a text-analytical approach (Werlich,
1983) and the study of the encoding / decoding context (Bhatia, 1993, 2004;
Swales, 1990) as the methodological framework, Annarita Tavani (a) provides
an analysis of distinctive characteristics of the SOFI reports and the
sub-genres they define, and (b) explores the diachronic evolution of
discursive practices used in this domain-specific genre. The corpus consists
of ten issues of the report. The findings indicate that in spite of the
structural stability of the documents, the distribution of text types and the
organization of topics are different across several editions.
Chapter Nine: The Genre Evolution of the UN Secretary-General’s Annual Reports
from 1953- 2010.
This chapter deals with a diachronic analysis of the evolution of the UN
Secretary-General’s Annual Reports over a 60-year period. Drawing on Swales
(1990, 2004) and Bhatia’s (1993, 2004) analytical frameworks, Cristina
Pennarola and Germana D’Acquisto indicate how discursive and linguistic
features of this genre have changed and how this genre, as an informative
genre, has evolved into a self-promotional genre expanding its communicative
purpose and domain of address. The corpus consists of 37 UN
Secretary-General’s Annual Reports on the Work of the Organization from
1953-2010. The analysis indicates significant changes in the narrative focus
and the authorial stance across the early and the recent reports.
Chapter Ten: From Making to Promoting Law: An Investigation into the Evolution
of ‘Food safety’ Discourse in EU Summaries.
This chapter presents a diachronic comparative analysis of the Summaries of
European legislation as a popularized form of the specialized genre of
Directives and a manifestation of the institutional legal discourse of the
European Union. Drawing on genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, and
studies on modality, Vanda Polese and Stefania D’Avanzo provide a contextual
framework to the analysis of this genre, analyze its features, and explore the
value of modal auxiliaries in this genre. The corpus consists of Summaries of
EU Directives in the thematic area of food safety from 1982 to 2008. The
findings indicate an increase in the occurrence of shall and migrating quotes
in the 1990s followed by a decrease in the 2000s. The authors conclude that
the discursive strategies identified in this study are functional to
strengthening legitimation and credibility in EU’s involvement in food safety.
Chapter Eleven: Genre-bending for Consensus Building: A Diachronic Perspective
on Monsanto’s Pledge Reports (2000-2009).
This chapter reports on a diachronic analysis of a business genre; namely
pledge reports. Taking a discourse-analytical approach to corporate social
responsibility communication, Paola Catenaccio traces the evolution of the
discursive strategies used in the reports published by the biotechnology giant
Monsanto over a span of 10 years. The corpus consists of all reports issued
between 2000 and 2009. The analysis indicates that although this genre has not
had dramatic changes over the years, the argumentative component of this genre
has increased progressively.
Chapter Twelve: Apologetic Discourse in Financial Reporting: CEO and Chairman
Statements. A Case Study.
This chapter deals with a diachronic study of apologetic discourse in Annual
Company Reports (ACRs). The study investigates the influence of external
circumstances on rhetorical strategies. Drawing upon the findings of Ware and
Linkugel (1973), Cinzia Giglioni analyzes the use of apologetic discourse
over time and its role in generic variation focusing on CEO’s and Chairman’s
Statements in ACRs. The corpus of the study is drawn from online resources and
consists of eighteen company reports issued in 2000 and 2009 by nine UK
companies. The findings reveal variations in this genre and highlight that
variations are related to the nature of economic outlook at each of the
above-mentioned periods.
Chapter Thirteen: The CEO’s New Year’s Message from the 1960s to 2000.
This chapter presents a study of the diachronic evolution of a business genre,
the CEO’s New Year’s message, in the period from the 1960s to 2000. Combining
qualitative and quantitative methods, Sylvain Dieltjens and Priscilla
Heynderickx analyze changes in various aspects of this genre such as length,
format, proportion of negative vs. positive information, structure of the
message, and linguistic features. They also examine the difference in
manifestation of this genre in times of crisis and times of economic
stability. The corpus consists of 142 New Year’s messages collected from the
archives of different Belgian companies. The findings indicate that although
the texts have become longer, the extent of attention to wishes have
decreased. CEOs ask for more dedication, and their sense of obligation to
thank employees for their efforts have decreased. Moreover, there is
variation in this genre in times of economic crisis and economic stability.
Business-related information has increased and become more detailed during
crisis times.
Chapter Fourteen: From Job Announcements to Recruitment Advertising: The
Evolution of Recruitment Ads in a Flemish Newspaper (1946-2010).
This chapter reports on a diachronic study of job ads. Drawing on textual
findings and factors in the Flemish context, Paul Gillaerts describes the
evolution of this genre in the Flemish newspaper De Standard over a period of
sixty years through a combination of various genre analytical approaches. The
findings indicate that in spite of the diachronic development of this genre
and high level of stability of its constituent moves, the strategies and
steps used in this genre indicate genre bending and mixing with other genres
such as direct mail and commercial advertising. The analysis also reveals the
growing significance of stance and interaction in this genre, which in turn
indicate the marketization of the genre.
Chapter Fifteen: Genre Variation and Genre Change: Theory and Applications.
In this chapter, Francesca Santulli focuses on the dynamic relationship
between genre and change, emphasizing attention to synchronic and diachronic
aspects of the concept of genre. She argues that genre functions can only be
explained in the light of their change and evolution. She applies the pattern
of genre variation and evolution to the analysis of the travel guide genre.
The origin of this text genre and some aspects of its recent evolutions are
the two aspects that are taken into account. The findings highlight the
significant role of the historical context in emergence, development, and
evolution of genre in general and the tourist guide in particular.
EVALUATION
“Genre Change in the Contemporary World” is an invaluable collection of
cutting-edge studies in the domain of genre analysis. The chapters are nicely
categorized into two sections, academic discourse and business discourse, and
each chapter demonstrates interesting research into a genre within these two
discourses. The categorization of studies and thematic coherence among them
provide a sense of flow and unity through the book. The volume requires
background knowledge on the concept of genre and genre analysis research. It
is an intriguing and insightful read for novice and established members of the
discourse community. It provides a multi-dimensional picture of genre change
in the contemporary world in the true sense of the word, sketches the concept
of genre in transition, draws attention to forces that shape it, and shed
light on dynamic as well as static aspects of different genres against various
waves of change.
Marina Bondi and Silvia Cavalieri’s research and Davide S. Giannoni’s study
are
noteworthy in terms of their methodological approaches. These studies adopt
an integrative methodological approach combining corpus and discourse
perspectives as well as quantitative and qualitative tools to investigate the
evolution of the abstract and genre variation in academic publishing
respectively. Using mixed data collection methods and tools increases the
reliability and validity of these studies and their findings.
Martin Solly’s chapter is the only chapter in this volume that focuses on an
oral genre, the commencement speech. This is appreciated, since genre studies
have mainly focused on written genres. Moreover, the findings of this research
study in terms of the role of social trends in the evolution of this genre and
its popularizing function are extremely interesting.
Min-Hsiu Liao’s study is also noteworthy in several respects. It addresses the
popularization of scientific discourse as a hot topic in genre studies, and
focuses on the role of genre users as an evolutionary force. It steps beyond
textual features of discourse and expands the investigation to institutional
and social aspects of discourse. Last but not least, it highlights the
interactions and reciprocal relationship among these discoursal spaces.
Sylvain Dieltjens and Priscilla Heynderickx’s research and Cinzia Giglioni’s
study are among the interesting chapters of the second section of this volume.
In addition to the diachronic nature of their analyses, which is a common
feature of research studies in this volume, these papers highlight the key
role of socioeconomic forces and situations in the emergence and evolution of
genres, discursive practices, and rhetorical strategies of genre users.
Francesca Santulli’s exploratory study on the travel guide as a recent text
genre provides a nice closing for this volume. It is noteworthy in that
Santulli highlights the significant role of the historical context in the
emergence, development, and evolution of genre, and presents a theoretical
approach in which she focuses on the dynamic relationship between genre and
change and emphasizes attention to synchronic and diachronic aspects of the
concept of genre.
This volume opens a fresh perspective on research into genre, and highlights
where future research needs to focus. It draws attention to more complicated
aspects of genre, redefining genre analysis in a social context beyond
conventional textual and formalistic aspects. It sheds light on the role of
socio-political and contextual factors in shaping and transforming genres. The
diachronic perspective of the research in this volume highlights the
transitory and context-bound nature of genre. The reciprocal relationship
between genre and discourse community, genre and social context, and text and
context are illustrated and the pivotal role of social trends and phenomena in
evolution, extinction and mutation of genres are nicely demonstrated. Another
distinctive aspect of this volume is its focus on the role of technological
innovations, especially computer-mediated technologies, in creation,
redefinition, transformation, and evolution of genres. Variety in
methodological approaches and implications for further study are also useful
for the reader.
REFERENCES
Bhatia, V. K. (1993). Analyzing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings.
London: Loman.
Bhatia, V. K. (2004). Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-based Approach.
London: Continuum.
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research
settings. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press.
Swales, J. M. (2004). Research genres: Explorations and applications. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Ware, B. L., Linkugel, W. A. (1973). They Spoke in Defense of Themselves: On
the Generic Criticism of Apologia. Quarterly Journal of Speech. 59, 273-283.
Werlich, E. (1983). A Text Grammar of English. Heidelberg: Quelle and Meyer.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Pejman Habibie is the Lead teacher assistant in the Faculty of Education at
the University of Western Ontario, Canada. His research interests are EAP,
EPAP, academic writing and publishing, genre analysis, and doctoral education.
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