Jul 20
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
EDITOR: Roberta Piazza
EDITOR: Monika Bednarek
EDITOR: Fabio Rossi
TITLE: Telecinematic Discourse
SUBTITLE: Approaches to the language of films and television series
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 211
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2011
REVIEWER: Julia Gillen, Lancaster University
SUMMARY
This collection of articles approaches an area of media studies relatively
rarely examined by linguists. A variety of approaches are taken to the
language of films and television series across British, American and Italian
cultures. The authors offer a variety of methodologies and perspectives on the
complexities of telecinematic discourse — more specifically, films, film
trailers and television series. One key theme taken up in several chapters is
that spoken dialogues of such genres have to differ from spontaneous discourse
at every linguistic level to be acceptable; authentic rhythms, content, and a
lack of teleological efficacy of everyday talk would not be tolerated. Yet at
the same time, an impression of verisimilitude has to be established in the
audience’s minds to enable a degree of suspension of disbelief. How such
dilemmas are realised in different genres is one significant focus of the
work, as are the ways in which individual characters can be differentiated.
The authors all argue that when working from a linguistic basis, it is
necessary to combine analyses that attend to other modes and offer diverse,
always detailed, demonstrations of their empirical work.
Chapter 1. Introduction: Analysing telecinematic discourse
Roberta Piazza, Monika Bednarek and Fabio Rossi
This chapter, by the editors, sets out to differentiate the two media
discourses studied — that of cinematic film and TV series. Four key issues
are identified: the relationship between represented and interactive
participants; the interface between the verbal and visual; the definition of
characters; and the relationship between real life and fictional discourses.
The authors explain and illustrate how the re-creation or re-presentation of
the world ”is always in line with the specific socio-cultural conventions of
the society in which telecinematic texts are produced. It is also in line
with a particular ‘media logic’ (Iedema 2001: 187) which differentiates these
products….” (p. 9). This sets the agenda for the following chapters, which
take different approaches to identifying and analysing how media logic
operates in specific examples.
Part I. Cinematic discourse
Chapter 2. Discourse analysis of film dialogues: Italian comedy between
linguistic realism and pragmatic non-realism
Fabio Rossi
Rossi demonstrates how the dubbed audio track featured not just in foreign
films, but also in Italian films, compares with spontaneous real-life talk. He
finds that film genres display fewer characteristics of spontaneous speech
such as redundancy, hesitation, overlap, etc., and show a higher degree of
coherence and cohesion. However, this aligns with audience expectations; just
as camera conventions are not naturalistic, but become expected, the
introduction of an ”excess of realism” would be jarring to the viewer.
Chapter 3. Using film as linguistic specimen: Theoretical and practical issues
Michael Álvarez-Pereyre
The author demonstrates how the very qualities that differentiate film
discourse from spontaneous real-life talk make it suitable for pedagogical
purposes. He points out that the objection that dialogues in films are
different from spontaneous speech is to ignore that substantial proportions of
language as it is encountered are not spontaneous. Thus, Álvarez-Pereyre
further develops investigation of, what he terms, ‘filmspeak’ as a genre.
Chapter 4. Multimodal realisations of mind style in Enduring Love
Rocío Montoro
‘Mind style’ is a stylistics term referring to the ”linguistic features that
project the peculiarities of characters’ cognitive make-up,” (p. 70) in the
author’s explanation. Here, Montoro extends the traditional language-based
approach of stylistics into a multimodal approach. She combines the analysis
of verbal signs as ”mind style indicators” (p. 69) with the analysis of
gestures and camera perspectives. Montoro aims to increase our sensitivity to
how qualities of characterisation achieved in the novel ”Enduring Love” are
skilfully realised in the film adaptation of the same name, including through
the use of camera angles and gesture.
Chapter 5. Pragmatic deviance in realist horror films: A look at films by
Argento and Fincher
Roberta Piazza
As is the case with other authors in this volume, Piazza is particularly
interested in how unconventional characters are depicted, here, in the genre
of ”realist horror” or ”slashers.” He demonstrates how deviance,
characteristic of horror films, is communicated through violation of Gricean
cooperative maxims. As the book exemplifies as a whole, this chapter
endeavours to offer an approach to film studies ”rooted in linguistic
stylistics” (p. 86) and, through painstaking work, to demonstrate the
benefits of this. That is, rather than offer a broad critique of the films,
Piazza considers very short sections intensively, examining the pragmatics of
language used against all elements of the multimodal realisation. It is shown
how in this genre the killers infringe the maxim of relevance, thus presenting
themselves to the audience as abnormal.
Chapter 6. Emotion and empathy in Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas : A case study
of the “funny guy” scene
Derek Bousfield and Dan McIntyre
The authors take a pragmatic approach to examining linguistic, paralinguistic
and kinesic manifestations of fear, seen as deriving from a lack of empathy
between two characters. The careful analysis of a two minute and 30 second
scene includes a multimodal transcript, likely to be helpful as a model to
others investigating both linguistic and non-linguistic features of film. They
demonstrate how the emotion of fear is realised in the complex interplay of
modes.
Chapter 7. Quantifying the emotional tone of James Bond films: An application
of the Dictionary of Affect in Language
Rose Ann Kozinski
Kozinski shows how the language of ”official” James Bond films differs from
Austin Powers parodies in the expression of emotionality. She deploys the
Dictionary of Affect in Language (Whissell 2009) to enable quantitative
analysis. The parodies adopt a distinctive tone she terms ”pleasant and
active”, whereas the Bond films demonstrate greater variety over time. Their
tone relates partly to the specific actor and partly according to temporal
cycles of variation in plot.
Chapter 8. Structure and function in the generic staging of film trailers: A
multimodal analysis
Carmen Daniela Maier
This chapter demonstrates an approach to the analysis of comedy film trailers
through examining their narrative structure. The author creates a framework
for investigation drawing on the work of Labov & Waletzky (1967). Applying
this reveals how all the nine stages of the prototypical comedy film trailer
contribute to the purpose of promotion, some implicitly and some explicitly.
Each stage is also associated with certain kinds of information given and
functions. Each specific trailer varies in how many of the stages are used and
their precise sequencing, but overall the model appears robust.
Part II. Televisual discourse
Chapter 9. “I don’t know what they’re saying half the time, but I’m hooked on
the series”: Incomprehensible dialogue and integrated multimodal
characterisation in The Wire
Michael Toolan
This chapter combines quantitative and qualitative analyses of TV series texts
with audience research. Toolan makes use of Kozloff’s (2000) idea of
”linguistic opacity” as part of the aesthetics of the TV series,
demonstrating how a strategy of deliberately inducing comprehension problems
in the audience is, at first sight, paradoxically, one of the means through
which the audience is engaged. So the police officers’ struggles to interpret
the gang’s intercepted communications involve the audience in this process.
Toolan ends by examining how dialogues are embedded multimodally and explains
how, for many viewers, this work was exceptional in conveying psychological
depth and sociological plausibility.
Chapter 10. The stability of the televisual character: A corpus stylistic case
study
Monika Bednarek
Stability of characterisation is usually assumed to be important to TV series,
i.e., that they do not change drastically over time. Using a corpus
linguistics approach, Bednarek demonstrates how stability of characterisation
is achieved, while still permitting the character some room for stylistic
differentiation, important for engaging the audience. Central to her
investigation of the ”Gilmore Girls” are analyses of a character’s
diachronic language variation across seasons and variation according to
interlocutor. For example, a term may appear far more frequently in earlier
episodes as the audience is encouraged to identify a character’s likes and
dislikes, but can later become more implied as the character has become more
established.
Chapter 11. Star Trek: Voyager’s Seven of Nine: A case study of language and
character in a televisual text
Susan Mandala
Here, the development of a character through a TV series, an essential part of
the plot, is shown to be achieved in large measure through changes in
(im)politeness strategies. In this case, the character focussed upon makes a
journey from cyborg to near-human, linguistically realised through adaptation
to politeness norms. For example, her early lack of negative politeness (Brown
& Levinson 1987) is gradually modified as she mitigates face-threating acts.
Chapter 12. Relationship impression formation: How viewers know people on the
screen are friends
Claudia Bubel
Using conversation analysis, Bubel investigates alignment patterns among four
central characters of the TV series Sex and the City. The specific interest is
the negotiation of friendship through shifting alignment patterns and
interpersonal affiliation/disaffiliation. In analysing shifting alignment
patterns Bubel considers both the negotiation of intersubjectivity and the
display of common cultural attitudes. She also illustrates the ways in which,
during conversation the four central characters affiliate with, for example,
one other and thus disaffiliate, at least momentarily, with at least one
other.
Chapter 13. Genre, performance and Sex and the City
Brian Paltridge, Angela Thomas and Jianxin Liu
Drawing on Butler’s (2004) notion of performativity, the authors analyse how
gendered identities are performed through the genre of casual conversation. A
major issue here is multimodality: non-linguistic modes of expression
belonging to the character such as dress and gesture are significant, as well
as the means by which these are framed. This chapter links strongly with the
last in providing theorised readings of this TV show that, for many, was a
significant cultural event.
Chapter 14. Bumcivilian: Systemic aspects of humorous communication in
comedies
Alexander Brock
Brock explores the creation of humour at various levels of language in terms
of linguistic deviance or incongruity by discussing a wide variety of
examples. He shows how incongruity can reside at any level of language, for
example, phonological, semantic or in the construction of an alternative
reading of the world. Brock demonstrates how incongruities can become
predictable, thus endangering the effect of humour. He concludes that the
development of a more complex understanding of humour is needed.
EVALUATION
This is a genuinely innovative collection of texts, examining aspects of media
discourse from a variety of different linguistics-based approaches. I can
imagine that a number of the chapters will be much cited as they lead to
promising directions of further investigation. However, I do own to two
questions that keep lingering as I have read and then re-read this book,
wondering how best to communicate its qualities to prospective readers. I want
to achieve something more useful in an evaluation than a mere reflection of my
own subjective responses to the chapters, grounded in my personal experiences.
I find it difficult to move far from my subjective responses with what became
my first major question: Is it necessary for the reader to have engaged with
the particular film or TV series in question in order to relate to the
chapters, and does a depth of engagement (i.e. in practice a liking for the
film or TV series) help? I have to admit that in general, I did often more
vividly appreciate the authors’ approaches when I was already familiar with
the media product. So, for example, my own strong positive responses to ”The
Wire”, ”Sex and the City” and ”Star Trek: Voyager” assisted my
understandings of some of the chapters about TV series. In particular,
Toolan’s multifaceted approach to the language of ”The Wire” seemed
extremely informative and original. When I was not familiar with the topic, I
sometimes struggled to understand the authors’ points. For example, it was
completely reasonable of Piazza, Bednarek and Rossi to illustrate their
introductory arguments in Chapter 1 through an extract from ”No Country for
Old Men,” a 2007 Coen brothers film, as a substantial proportion of likely
readers may be assumed to have seen it. As it happens, I regret to admit I
have not. For me, the extract the authors chose to discuss seemed hackneyed
and lifeless. Two unsubtle pieces of characterisation jump off the page as
indicative of psychopathic travelling baddie first encountering a hapless,
defenceless victim. I emphasise, of course, that this is no comment against
the film, but rather a reference to how the text seemed narrow and clichéd to
me when unfamiliar with the full multimodal presentation. As a result, I
doubtless lost something in my understanding of the discussion.
Yet, to return to my original question, it was not always the case that
familiarity with the media product led to my learning more from or further
appreciating the chapters. Rossi’s chapter, working with dubbing in
mid-twentieth century Italian films, conveyed fascinating insights into the
nature of film language. There are many very good chapters in the book; each
possesses some good qualities, but space precludes me from writing a proper
appreciation of them all. In my opinion, Rossi’s and Toolan’s chapters were
the most informative, multifaceted and enjoyable to read. Toolan’s energy in
combining a number of different approaches positively fizzes off the page.
Through willingness to combine methods including audience research, he wisely
avoided the presumption of homogeneity of reception, that for me at the very
least flavoured some interpretations in other chapters.
My second question remains one that still genuinely puzzles me. For me, there
is a glaring dividing line between the two approaches taken in the book. Did
the editors expect this dichotomy to emerge? The issue here is between two
approaches to telecinematic discourse. The first approach, that is most
clearly introduced by the editors, and exemplified in most chapters, is an
explicit recognition of the crafted nature of telecinematic discourse. Both
Rossi and Toolan, among others, never lose sight of the artificiality of the
media product. All authors, whether explicitly or implicitly, contribute
insights into how scripts are written and become effective. However, some tend
to occlude attention to the realised character as crafted, and instead analyse
the language of characters virtually as if they were real. Personal intentions
and communicative means through which they are pursued are ascribed to the
character herself or himself. There is always some reference to the context as
a media product, but nonetheless, I felt the tone to be very different from
the more dominant recognition of media product as craft. I regret that the
editors did not choose to discuss this issue and matters arising — a
concluding chapter could have been fascinating.
In sum, this is a thought-provoking book, appropriate for those who wish to
experiment with diverse approaches to media discourse from linguistic
perspectives that take account of other modalities. The editors and publishers
have done an excellent job of presentation; the texts are enhanced by careful
figures and tables, and the composite index is admirable.
REFERENCES
Brown, Penelope & Stephen Levinson. 1987. Politeness: Some universals in
language useage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing gender. New York: Routledge.
Iedema, Rick. 2001. Analysing film and television: a social semiotic account
of Hospital: an unhealthy business. In van Leeuwen, T. & Jewitt, C. Handbook
of visual analysis. London: Sage (183-204).
Kozloff, Sarah. 2000. Overhearing film dialogue. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Labov, William & Joshua Waletzky. 1967. Narrative analysis: oral versions of
personal experience. In J. Helm (ed). Essays on the verbal and visual arts.
Seattle: American Ethnological Society (12-44).
Whissell, Cynthia 2009. Using the revised Dictionary of Affect in Language to
quantify the emotional undertones of samples of natural language.
Psychological Reports 102: 469-483.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Julia Gillen is Senior Lecturer in Digital Literacies in the Literacy Research
Centre and Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster
University, UK. Her teaching responsibilities include supervising
dissertations in language and the media and convening an undergraduate course
called Understanding Media. She researches language in multimodal
interaction, approached through a sociocultural perspective. Fields of study
include: virtual worlds; Twitter; early childhood; sports journalism and the
Edwardian postcard.
Jul 20
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
AUTHOR: Nicholas J. Enfield
TITLE: The Anatomy of Meaning
SUBTITLE: Speech, Gesture, and Composite Utterances
SERIES TITLE: Language Culture and Cognition 8
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2012
REVIEWER: Katharine Parton, University of Melbourne
SUMMARY
This book analyzes utterances which occur using both speech and gesture.
Enfield argues that speech and gesture can be, in his examples, understood as
co-occurring signs which, in that co-occurrence, become composite utterances,
and as such, carry new, composite meanings. Enfield explores this perspective
on gesture and speech composite utterances through examples from speakers of
Lao, focusing first on pointing gestures with speech, and then examining
illustrative gestures with their co-occurring talk. He argues that in order to
understand social interaction and the meanings that people create with and for
one another in each interaction, it is the composite utterance (i.e. the
gesture plus speech) that needs to form the basis of interactional analysis.
In the book’s opening chapter Enfield argues that meaning’s genesis, following
a neo-Peircean semiotic and neo-Gricean pragmatic perspective, is not
language. Rather, language forms one part of the complexity of signs that
create meaning between people. Enfield first lays out examples of composite
utterances across a variety of modalities. He posits that meaning across
examples from artwork, such as paintings, requires an examination of visual
aspects and titles of paintings to understand the meaning the artist intends.
A photograph of a historically significant moment demonstrates that the
meaning of the photographic semiotic whole only becomes apparent when the
complexity of the photograph’s historical and social context is identified,
and thus, that meaning itself is composite in nature. Enfield goes on to
position his analysis of speech and gesture as signs within both gesture and
semiotic research.
The remaining chapters are grouped into two parts: the first deals with
deictic components of moves and the second with illustrative components of
moves. Enfield examines demonstratives, lip-pointing and hand-pointing as
deictic components and includes modeling, diagramming and editing in the
illustrative moves he discusses.
Chapter 2, on demonstratives, uses data from video-recorded interactions
between Lao speakers in a variety of face-to-face, naturally occurring
situations, from market places to riverside discussions. Enfield focuses on
the Lao system of spatial proximity description, arguing that, through an
examination of the speaker’s gestures, the two-term system ‘nii4’ and ‘nan4’,
previously defined as ‘proximal’ and ‘distal’, should be seen as
context-dependent and descriptive of social interactional space relations
rather than as a binary, static distinction. He argues that these
demonstratives rely on both semantic and pragmatic meaning for interactional
deployment, and as such, are composite utterances. Chapter 2 argues that the
meaning of ‘nii4’ and ‘nan4’ can be seen as constructed by interactants,
through the use of demonstratives, to create ‘engagement areas’ and
‘here-spaces’, which form the basis of Enfield’s analysis. He further argues
that these areas/spaces and ‘co-constructing’ uses of ‘nii4’ and ‘nan4’ are
conventionalized and predictable and that they are locally constructed with
fluid meaning, depending on the interaction and interactional space.
In opening Chapter 3, Enfield problematizes the labeling of so-called
‘lip-pointing’. He shows that it is a widely occurring phenomenon studied in
linguistics and gesture studies across a number of languages and geographical
locations. Chapter 3 surveys a number of lip-pointing examples from a variety
of languages, allowing Enfield to argue that lip-pointing rarely, if ever,
involves only the lips. Interactions between Lao speakers are again shown
using stills from video of speakers’ interactions, with a focus on the
relationships between lip-pointing and co-occurring hand-pointing and gaze
direction (both matched and mismatched with lip-pointing directionality).
Enfield concludes that the lip-pointing practice in Lao is used to describe
the location of referents, and, when combined with other deictic practices,
can result in varying interactional purposes.
Following the chapter on lip-pointing, Chapter 4 provides an account of an
empirical study of hand-pointing across Lao speakers. Here, the data comes
from both Lao interactions and semi-structured interviews eliciting pointing
gestures. Enfield argues that Big and Small (i.e. B-point and S-point)
gestures have different functions within Lao social interactions, but that
both types of gestures and the gestures’ co-occurring speech should be
considered as fundamentally composite utterances.
Part II of “The Anatomy of Meaning” focuses on the illustrative components of
moves using longer extracts of interaction (again, video-recorded) along with
transcriptions, including images taken from the recordings. The examples in
Chapter 5 are descriptions of the fishing equipment used locally and the
examples in Chapter 7 are explanations of kinship systems and marriage
practices within those kinship systems. Chapter 6 uses both kinship and
fishing examples.
In Chapter 5, Enfield discusses examples of descriptions of fishing equipment,
showing that the gestures which co-occur with the verbal descriptions model
the actual, physical equipment and its use. Supporting one of the main thrusts
of the book, the verbal description alone is insufficient to understand the
appearance and functionality of the fishing equipment, and therefore, the
speech and gesture must be understood, Enfield argues, as composite to access
the full meaning of the utterance. Further, he shows that these modeling
gestures are both combinatoric and linear in interactional uses. He argues for
a predominance of two handed symmetry in the first stage of the gesture
sequence, followed by one hand taking over the representation of the first
stage, while the other hand is able to manipulate what the first hand is now
‘standing for’. As such, Enfield argues that meaning from the composite
utterance is built over several gestural moves in a linear fashion.
Enfield builds on the modeling examples to put forward an argument that Lao
speakers use the body and gestures as cognitive artifacts. In Chapter 6, he
first gives a comprehensive overview of Lao kinship systems and the rules
governing marriage within that community. He then uses the examples of kinship
diagramming over both speech and gesture to argue that not only are the bodies
and gestures cognitive artifacts, but that they are, in fact, separate
cognitive artifacts because the gestures have existence, in these examples,
which outlasts their physical performance.
An argument Enfield continues in the next chapter (Chapter 7), on ‘Editing’,
is that the gesturers can return to the site of earlier gestures in order to
manipulate the diagrams as they were ‘drawn’. Enfield gives a limited typology
of the types of editing that gesturers perform (p. 220) and calls for further
research on the editing practices of gestures that interact with gestural
diagrams in this way.
EVALUATION
Enfield’s book positions itself as research on meaning, specifically, the
‘unification of meaning’, and he argues for understanding component signs
within interactional moves as parts of wholes which must taken together when
analyzing interaction. As such, “The Anatomy of Meaning” is an invaluable
resource for anyone working on how interactants create, maintain or change and
transmit meaning within interactions, whether these are face-to-face, heavily
gestural, or otherwise. However, given the book’s focus on the gestural, it
would potentially be helpful to readers of this research if videos of the
interactions analyzed were made available by the publishers, perhaps online,
to complement the transcriptions and images in the printed book.
Enfield’s book has obvious relevance for gesture studies as a whole; first,
because it argues for the importance of gesture in any interactional analysis,
and second, because of the specific types of gestures described and analyzed
across several chapters. The chapters on diagramming and editing hold
particular interest for researchers in cognition, whether it be from a social
or distributed perspective. The in-depth analysis of the previously-called
proximal/distal ‘nii4’ and ‘nan4’ system shows a fascinating insight into how
descriptive linguistics could use gesture to more accurately delve into the
meanings of various linguistic features in all languages.
Obviously, “The Anatomy of Meaning” gives significant insight into Lao
speakers’ cultural practices in its discussion of kinship and fishing
practices, and as such, would be of great relevance to anthropologists and
linguists working in that area. Its focus on kinship diagramming opens a line
of inquiry into the describing of kinship practices across linguistic (and
cultural) variation, which should be of interest to anyone studying kinship
terms, organization, and marriage practices, both within communities of Lao
speakers and cross-culturally.
Enfield’s book calls for further research on a number of points he raises
within his analysis and argumentation and this call needs to be answered from
researchers across semiotics and meaning, gesture studies, anthropology,
typology and descriptive linguistics, as well as those engaging in the study
of interaction and cognition.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Katharine Parton is a PhD candidate in the School of Languages & Linguistics
at the University of Melbourne. Her research examines interaction in
orchestral rehearsal, focussing on gesture. Her broader research interests
include epistemics, social cognition, gesture and social interaction.
Jul 20
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
EDITOR: Carol Berkenkotter
EDITOR: Vijay K. Bhatia
EDITOR: Maurizio Gotti
TITLE: Insights into Academic Genres
SERIES TITLE: Linguistic Insights – Volume 160
PUBLISHER: Peter Lang AG
YEAR: 2012
REVIEWER: Pejman Habibie, University of Western Ontario
SUMMARY
“Insights into Academic Genres” brings together selected papers originally
presented at the conference on “Genre Variation in English Academic
Communication: Emerging Trends and Disciplinary Insights” in Bergamo on 23-25
June 2011. The volume consists of twenty-one chapters that are grouped into
four thematic sections: “Theoretical Insights,” “Presenting Research
Insights,” “Reviewing and Popularizing Research Insights,” and “Insights into
Pedagogic Genres.” There is a “notes on contributors” part at the end of the
volume.
In the introduction chapter, Gotti, Berkenkotter, and Bhatia present an
overview of the concept of genre including the significance and status of
genre and genre analysis, recent perspectives in genre theory and genre
studies, and diversity of methodological tools for specialized genre analysis.
The final part of the chapter outlines a summary of the contents of this
volume.
The two chapters in Section One, “Theoretical Insights,” address the most
relevant and recent issues and innovations in various areas of research into
academic genres. In the first chapter of this section, “Genre change in the
digital age: Questions about dynamism, affordances, evolution,” Carol
Berkenkotter investigates genre variation in an emerging digital genre in
academic communication, namely the blog. She argues that different
perspectives on generic variation depend on the theorist’s conceptual
framework and disciplinary training. Affordances, uptake, dynamism, and stance
are proposed as the criteria for evaluating the generic status of online
blog-posts. The next part of the chapter reports an analysis of stance
markers in blog posts.
The second chapter in this section, “Interdiscursivity in academic genre,”
deals with interdiscursivity in two academic genres, the doctoral thesis and
the research article. Vijiay Bhatia highlights how research articles are
discursively constructed based on doctoral theses and how an understanding of
interdiscursivity sheds light on underlying communicative processes of these
genres. He suggests a critical approach to genre analysis, in which not only
text-internal, but also text-external factors as well as interdiscursivity are
taken into account. He argues that such an approach clarifies the challenges
that emerging writers encounter for submitting their research articles to
international journals.
The chapters in Section Two, “Presenting Research Insights,” address genres
that report research results such as the research article, the conference
presentation, and the Ph.D. dissertation. The paper “Value marking in an
academic genre: When authors signal goodness,” by David Giannoni, addresses
value marking in the research article. Giannoni focuses on the embededness of
values in the research article and their linguistic representations in this
academic genre. In this corpus-based study, a combination of qualitative and
quantitative procedures, concordance data, and manual investigation are
employed to analyze explicit goodness-marking lexis in a corpus of 100
research articles. The findings of this study indicate that “goodness” is more
common in social sciences due to the value-laden nature of these disciplines
The next chapter, “Such a reaction would spread all over the cell like a
forest fire: A corpus study of argument by analogy in scientific discourse,”
reports a study of argument by analogy conducted in a corpus linguistics
framework. In this chapter, Davide Mazzi analyzes the use of discursive
resources, indicating argument by analogy in a corpus of scientific discourse.
He adopts van Eemeren and Grootendorst’s (1992, p. 97) view of analogy as the
point of reference and uses a corpus of 140 authentic medico-scientific
research articles published in 14 specialized journals. The findings indicate
a high frequency of this technique the “Results” and “Discussion” sections and
highlight its significant status and argumentative and reinforcing functions
in discursive practices of medico-scientific writers.
The next chapter, “Exploring generic integrity and variation: Research
articles in two English-medium interactional applied economics journals,”
deals with generic integrity and variation in the research article. In this
genre-based research, Pilar Mur-Duenas focuses on intrageneric and
intradisciplinary variation in research articles published in English in two
international applied economics journals. The research aims to shed light on
discursive practices of scholars as they calibrate their writing conventions
according to different publication sites. The results highlight the
significance of the site of publication and its influence on writing for
scholarly publication practices of scholars.
In chapter six, “Generic integrity in jurisprudence and philosophy of law:
Metadiscursive strategies for expressing dissent within constraints of
collegiality,” William Bromwich examines generic integrity conventions in the
domain of jurisprudence and philosophy of law. Taking Bhatia’s genre-oriented
perspective (1993, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2007), he investigates how authors
working in competing frameworks draw on metadiscursive devices such as
evaluative lexis and markers to indicate their stance on different issues, and
challenge research findings of other members of their discourse communities on
the one hand, and avoid dialogic frictions, and observe collegiality codes
with their colleagues, on the other hand. The corpus includes the complete
series of papers published in the “International Journal of Jurisprudence and
Philosophy of Law” in 2009-2011.
Chapter seven, “The title of my paper is…: Introducing the topic in
conference presentations,” addresses topic introduction in conference
presentations. Francisco Javier Fernandez Polo argues that although topic
introduction is redundant at the beginning of a conference presentation, this
move still plays a significant part in conference presentations . Moreover,
the study aims to investigate the intertextual relationship between topic
announcement and the title slide and to shed light on the structure and
constituent linguistic features of this move. The corpus of the study includes
the introductory sections of 31 conference presentations in English.
Chapter eight, “Why do we have to write? : Practice-based theses in the visual
and performing arts and the place of writing,” deals with practice-based
theses in the fields of visual and performing arts. Drawing on data from
interviews, surveys, and institutional documentation and guidelines,
Starfield, Paltridge, and Ravielli adopt a textographical approach (Swales,
1998a, 1998b) to investigate the place of writing, and explore written
constituent components of practice-based doctorates in those fields.
Chapter nine, “A genre analysis of Japanese and English introductory chapters
of literature Ph.D. theses,” is part of a larger on-going genre study of the
doctoral dissertation. In this chapter, Masumi Ono investigates generic
structures in the thesis introductory chapters of Ph.D. dissertations in the
field of literature, comparing English and Japanese. Ninety-nine introductory
chapters of literature Ph.D. theses are analyzed. The results indicate
cross-cultural differences in number, frequency, and obligatory status of
constituent steps of this genre.
The chapters in Section Three, “Reviewing and Popularizing Research Insights,”
deal with genres that are not used for reporting innovative findings, but are
reviewed in academic discussions and disseminated among colleagues in the
academic community.
In chapter ten, “The move structure of academic theatre reviews,” Anna
Stermieri investigates the academic theater review. Drawing on Swales’ (1990)
and Bhatia’s (1993; 2004) theoretical models, she analyzes the schematic move
structure of this under-researched genre and examines various aspects of
diachronic variation over a period of a decade (1991-2001). The underlying
hypothesis of this study is that the conditions in which the critic operates
and any probable fluctuations in these conditions will influence the critics’
performance and consequently their writing practices. The corpus of this study
includes 67 academic theater reviews that appeared in six academic journals.
Chapter eleven, “The dissemination of scientific knowledge in academia,”
examines two related genres. Comparing research abstracts (as a formal
academic genre) and their derived science reports (as a popular mixed genre),
Susan Kermas looks at the differences between these genres and investigate the
role of redrafting strategies in the popularization of scientific and academic
knowledge. This study indicates how the interconnection between topic and
readership determines lexical and linguistic features in each of these genres.
In chapter twelve, “Blurred genres: Hybrid functions in the medical field,”
Isabel Herrando-Rodrigo contrasts medical research articles and their more
popularized counterparts — “Medical electronic popularizations” (or
“Med-E-Pops”) — in order to highlight the hybridization process between
these genres. Exploring the genre of Med-E-Pops, she emphasizes that
Med-E-Pops reflect their corresponding research articles. She argues that
Med-E-Pops writers knowingly adapt research articles into more popularized and
comprehensible texts in order to raise the reliability of their texts, promote
their research, and expand readership in cyberspace.
Chapter thirteen, “Comments in academic blogs as a new form of scholarly
interaction,” aims at studying how the interpersonal strategies in blog
comments compare to those in other academic and computer-mediated
communication genres. In this study, Maria Jose Luzon analyzes a corpus of
eleven academic blogs from different disciplines, focusing on markers of
social and antisocial behavior. The findings highlight the hybrid nature of
comments in academic blogs and underline their role in constructing both
social and antisocial relations.
In chapter fourteen, “Cross-cultural differences in the construal of authorial
voice in the genre of diploma theses,” Olga Dontcheva-Navratilova examines
cross-cultural variation in the construal of authorial voice in relation to
the generic structure of theses written by Czech and German students of
English. The main objective of the study is an analysis of novice non-native
speakers’ use of pronominal self-reference items and impersonal
“it-“constructions to project an authorial voice into their master’s theses
written in English.
In chapter fifteen, “Cross-cultural differences in the use of discourse
Markers by Czech and German students of English in the genre of master’s
theses,” Renata Povolna investigates variation between the ways in which
novice non-native writers from two different discourse communities have
adopted the appropriate use of causal and contrastive discourse markers when
building coherent relations in academic texts. The study uses a small sample
of about 352000 words taken from a large corpus of Master’s theses written by
students of English in their final year of study. The findings indicate
cross-cultural variation in use of causal and contrastive discourse markers
(especially hypotactic and paratactic ones) as well as idiosyncrasies in use
of certain markers.
The chapters in Section Four, “Insights into Pedagogic Genres,” investigate
those genres that are used for educational purposes at a university level. In
chapter sixteen, “Variation in students’ accounts of graphic data: Context and
cotext factors in a polytechnic setting,” Carmen Sancho-Guinda examines
commentaries written by engineering students, focusing on a number of
constructive, contextual, and cotextual factors of those discourses, and the
role of such factors in discoursal variation. A combination of Goffman’s
(1971) interaction orders, the definitions of voice by Blommaert (2005) and
Ede (1989), and Hyland’s (2005) model of writer stance and engagement
constitute the theoretical framework for the interpretation of the results of
this study. The findings highlight variation in visual data reports in terms
of the expression of positioning and indicate that engagement features
outnumber stance features considerably.
In chapter seventeen,” K (Contract) Case Briefs in American law schools: A
genre-based analysis,” Michela Giordano conducts a qualitative and
quantitative genre analysis of a corpus of contract case briefs, a common
genre for students in American law schools, submitted by law students to an
online contract case brief bank. This study adopts Bhatia’s (1993) four-move
analytical model. An interesting feature of this study is an examination of
abbreviations and symbols in order to gain insights into how these represent
rhetorical strategies the student adopts as a way of analyzing a particular
case opinion in a formulaic way, recording and summarizing the outcomes for
further research and classroom discussion.
Chapter eighteen, “Digital video projects in English for academic purposes:
Students’ and lecturers’ perceptions and issues raised,” reports a study
conducted by Christoph A. Hafner, Lindsay Miller, and Connie Ng Kwai-Fun in
the context of an EAP course in an English-medium university in Hong Kong.
This qualitative study aims to configure a pedagogical approach to academic
literacy, which incorporates new advancements in information and communication
technologies. Students create a digital video scientific documentary, a hybrid
genre in digital media that brings together digital literacy practices with
traditional approaches to disciplinary English for academic purposes.
Chapter nineteen, “Interactive whiteboards as enhancers of genre hybridization
in academic settings,” reports a study on the incorporation of information and
communication technology tools into academic contexts. Patrizia Anesa and
Daniela Iovino investigate how integration of these tools, such as interactive
whiteboards, into academic courses facilitates the combination of features
that are typically associated with different genres such as lectures,
seminars, and presentations, and consequently, contributes to academic genre
hybridization, as a key feature of academic discourse.
In chapter twenty, “Representation of events and event participants in
academic course descriptions,” Sara Gesuato investigates characteristics of
academic course descriptions English through a textual approach. This study
focuses on lexico-grammatical representations of courses, teachers and
students, and events as the main components of academic course descriptions.
The study’s objectives are to determine the visibility of those components in
the texts and to determine the functional status of the texts (informational,
regulatory, or both) based on the assertions made about those components. The
corpus of this study consists of 100 course descriptions from ten disciplines.
EVALUATION
The attraction of “Insights into Academic Genres” begins with the book’s
high-caliber editors, Carol Berkenkotter, Vijay K. Brattier, and Maurizio
Gotti. The selection of cutting-edge studies, thematic organization of the
chapters, and the way they dovetail with each other in each section are all
indicative of the comprehensive knowledge of the editors (see also
Berkenkotter, Huckin, & Ackerman, 1988). Their informed decisions and quality
editing make this volume more than a mere conference proceedings volume.
The volume presupposes knowledge of the concept of genre, and is addressed to
novice and established members of the discourse community that intend to know
what the state of the art of genre analysis is, and where future research
needs to focus on. It introduces new perspectives on the concept of genre and
genre analysis, focusing on new, (semi)-occluded, and emerging genres in
academia. The focus on a wide range of hot topics such as (sub)disciplinary,
cross-cultural variation, genre sets, generic integrity, hybridization and
popularization in combination with assorted methodological approaches make
this volume a must-read for those interested in genre.
Carol Berkenkotter’s chapter is one of the cornerstones of this volume. This
chapter puts forward interesting questions about conceptualization of genre
and generic variation in today’s digital context and draws attention to
importance and status of digital genres and internet-based discursive
practices. Stepping beyond traditional concepts of genre and genre analysis,
it also highlights the significance of further research into evolution of
“protean genres” such as wikis and blogs as a budding research area in today’s
research arena. Highlighting the theorist’s stance in conceptualization of
generic variation, this innovative chapter focuses on the blog as a rising
academic genre and operationalizes the concept of genre as a “recognition
category”.
Vijay Bhatia’s chapter presents a new and different perspective on research
article as one of the most-researched academic genres. In contrast to the bulk
of research on research articles, which is dedicated to the lexical and
rhetorical analysis of different sections of this genre and its evolution
overtime, this chapter focuses on the significance of “ management of
interdiscursive space” in genre analysis in general and between this genre and
doctoral theses in particular and challenges and complexities of novice
scholars for writing for scholarly publication. It highlights social-cultural
aspects and functions of genre rather than merely textual ones, draws
attention to underlying differences existent even in similar genres, and as
Bhatia argues, underlines the significance of a critical approach to genre
analysis. Considering the undeniable significance of scholarly publications in
global scholarship and “publish or perish” as one of the biggest challenges
for both established and novice academics, this chapter provides invaluable
insights for those interested in the research and pedagogy of writing for
scholarly publication.
Davide S. Giannoni’s chapter is noteworthy in two aspects. First, focusing on
an under-researched area in genre studies, this chapter deals with axiology of
academic discourse and linguistic manifestations and features of values
embedded in academic discourse. Second, from a methodological perspective,
this research uses a novel mixed-methods design combining quantitative
automatic and manual tools and techniques for identification of value-making
features in a written corpus of 100 research articles.
Francisco Javier Fernandez Polo’s chapter is the only chapter in this volume
that focuses on an oral genre namely, conference presentations. The
significance of oral genres in general and and conference presentations in
particular and their role in academic lives of scholars on the one hand and
the fact that genre studies have mainly focused written genres on the other
hand make this chapter a must-read.
Starfield, Paltridge, and Ravioli’s chapter is also one of the stronger
contributions in this volume. The research reported in their chapter is
noteworthy in terms of its methodological approach. In spite of the
traditional approach to genre analysis in which written discourse was the sole
source of data, this study adopts an investigative approach combining text
analysis and ethnographic methods to investigate a student-generated genre,
i.e., practice-based theses, in relatively new fields of visual and performing
arts. Attention to data triangulation through drawing on mixed data collection
methods such as survey, interview, and document analysis and longitudinal
nature of this study make the findings and implications of this research
particularly relevant.
Anna Stermieri’s pioneering research into the academic theater review is one
of the most interesting chapters of the third section of this volume. The
findings of this study are noteworthy as they highlight two interesting
features in this genre. At the macro-level, the results indicate a four-move
pattern in the rhetorical organization of this genre. At the micro-level, the
results reveal the double deixis of time and space as an interesting feature
in one of the constituent moves (the “Narrative move”).
Maria Jose Luzon’s research into academic blogs, as a genre of growing
popularity with academics, is also one of the must –reads in this volume.
Unlike most traditional genre studies, it focuses on an Internet-mediated
genre and on the hybrid nature of communication in a web-based social space.
Carmen Sancho-Guinda’s study is noteworthy in two respects. First, the study
examines graphic commentaries of visuals as a hybrid, unresearched genre in
applied linguistics. Second, the study adopts a mixed-methods approach
(combining discourse-based and corpus-informed methodology). The combination
of quantitative and qualitative methods and tools into innovative methods and
designs is an interesting feature of Giannoni’s, Mazzi’s, and Sancho-Guinda’s
studies as well.
Overall, this book is a very welcome addition to research on academic genres.
Any comments on what more could have been included or addressed seems
difficult, as the nature and focus of the papers presented at the conference,
and the editors’ subjective criteria for selection are not known. However,
based on the current content, the book could have done more justice to oral
academic genres and corpora as well as cross-cultural generic variation.
Moreover, an index at the end of the book would have added to the merits of
this volume.
Globalization and internationalization of academia require more in-depth
inquiry into student-produced genres, and cross-cultural, and contextual
factors that influence generic integrity and variation. Research also needs to
focus on (semi)occluded, and emerging disciplinary genres that students,
especially international ones, need to acquire for socialization purposes in
academia.
REFERENCES
Berkenkotter, C., Huckin, T. N., & Ackerman, J. (1988). Conventions,
conversations, and the writer: Case study of a student in a rhetoric Ph.D.
program. Research in the Teaching of English, 22(1), 9-44.
Bhatia, V. K. (1993). Analyzing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings.
London: Longman.
Bhatia, V. K. (2000). Generic View of Academic Discourse. In: J. Flowerdew
(Ed), Academic Discourse (pp. 21-39). London: Pearson.
Bhatia, V. K. (2002). Applied Genre Analysis: A Multi-perspective Model.
Iberia, 4, 3-19.
Bhatia, V. K. (2004). Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-based Approach.
London: Continuum.
Bhatia, V. K. (2007). Interdiscursivity in Critical Genre Analysis. Paper
given at the Fourth International Symposium on Genre Studies, Unusual, Brazil.
Blommaert, J. (2005). Discourse. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ede, L. S. (1989). Work in Progress: A Guide to Writing and Revising. New
York: St. Martin’s Press.
Goffman, E. (1971). Relations in Public. New York: Harper & Row.
Hyland, K. (2005). Stance and Engagement: A Model of Interaction in Academic
Discourse. Discourse Studies, 7(2), 173-192.
Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research
Settings. Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press.
Swales, J. M. (1998a). Textography: Toward a Contextualization of Written
Academic Discourse. Research on Language and Social Interaction, 31(1),
109-121.
Swales, J. M. (1998b). Other Floors, Other Voices: A Textography of a Small
University Building. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Swales, J. M. (2004). Research Genres: Explorations and Applications. New
York: Cambridge University Press.
Van Eemeren, F. H., & Grootendorst, R. (1992). Argumentation, Communication
and Fallacies. A Pragma-Dialectical Perspective. Hillsdale, N.J.; Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates.
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,
academic writing and publishing, genre analysis, and doctoral education.
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