Analysing Genre

Language Use in Professional Settings

V. K. Bhatia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317896531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Genre analysis has a long-established tradition in literature, but interest in the analysis of non-literary genres has been very recent. This book examines the theory of genre analysis, looks at genre analysis in action, taking texts from a wide variety of genres and discusses the use of genre analysis in language teaching and language reform.

Part 1:

Genre Analysis – Theoretical Preliminaries

The main purpose of this part is not to review literature in discourse analysis as such but to look at the developments in linguistics relevant to the analysis of professional and academic genres for applied linguistic purposes. It particularly focuses on discourse analysis as pure linguistic description, whether formal, functional or discoursal, and language description as explanation. Discourse analysis as description typically concentrates on the linguistic aspects of text construction and interpretation, whereas discourse analysis as explanation goes beyond such a description to rationalize conventional aspects of genre construction and interpretation, in an attempt to answer the question: Why do members of a specialist community write the way they do?

Part 1 also includes an extensive discussion of genre analysis as a multi-disciplinary activity, and outlines an approach to the analysis of professional and academic discourse. Its main strength is that it is primarily for applied linguistic purposes, which implies that the linguistic theory should be within the grasp of an average practitioner of English for Specific Purposes (ESP). In this respect, it is less of an extension of linguistic formalism, but more of a combination of essential grammatical insights and adequate socio-cognitive and cultural explanation. It focuses on the specific realizations of conventionalized communicative purposes rather than on the universal of discourse theory. Finally, it tends to offer a grounded description of language in use rather than a surface analysis of linguistic form.

1	From description to explanation in discourse analysis

Discourse analysis, as a study of language use beyond the sentence boundaries, has become an established discipline. It started attracting multidisciplinary attention in the early seventies and has developed into a variety of approaches motivated by a wide range of interests and orientations. In sociology, for example, analysis of language, under the name of ethnography of communication, provides insights into the structuring of communicative behaviour and its role in conduct of social life. Ethnomethodology, as developed by Garfinkel (1967, 1972), is concerned primarily with discovering the underlying processes which speakers of a language utilize in order to produce and interpret communicative experiences, including the unstated assumptions which are shared socio-cultural knowledge and understanding. In philosophy, speech act theory has motivated an interest in the formulation of rules of language use as against rules of grammar. In cognitive psychology, the study of discourse as schema theory, frame analysis, and conceptual analysis in terms of scripts, has been motivated by the interest in how knowledge of the world is acquired, organized, stored, represented and used by the human mind in the production and understanding of discourse. In literature, in the name of literary or linguistic stylistics, it provides an understanding of how literary writers achieve aesthetic value in their creative writing by describing, interpreting and analysing literary style. In linguistics, it has been given several names, such as: text-linguistics, text analysis, conversational analysis, rhetorical analysis, functional analysis, and clause-relational analysis. The main object of all these studies has been to understand the structure and function of language use to communicate meaning.

Within linguistics, discourse analysis has developed and can be distinguished along several parameters. The first one is that of theoretical orientation. On the theoretical orientation scale one could broadly identify at one end discourse studies as an extension of grammatical formalism, with a focus on formal, and sometimes functional, aspects of language use, including semantics and pragmatics; and, at the other end, discourse analyses of institutionalized use of language in socio-cultural settings with a heavy emphasis on communication as social action. The more theoretical studies are generally based on a particular theoretical framework in linguistics; text-linguistics pioneered by van Dijk and others, for instance, is based on transformational generative framework. Similarly, register and, to some extent, genre analysis within the systemic linguistic framework are other examples of this tradition. The studies at the other end of the scale are less concerned about the use of a particular linguistic framework but more with the actual communication in an institutionalized socio-cultural context. Examples of this second kind of discourse analysis are analyses of spoken interactions in the ethnomethodological tradition and analyses of professional and academic research genres by Swales (1981b) and Bhatia (1982).

The second parameter is that of general-specific scale. In the direction of generality we find discourse analyses of everyday conversation, analyses of written discourse in terms of descriptive, narrative, argumentative writing; whereas in the specific direction, we find analyses of research article introductions, legislative provisions, doctor-patient consultation and counsel-witness examination as genres. Somewhere in between, we can place register analyses of scientific and journalistic texts, etc.

The third parameter along which it is useful to distinguish discourse analysis is that of application. There are studies of discourse which have been motivated by an applied concern with language teaching, particularly for the teaching of ESP. Much of applied discourse analysis in linguistics, particularly on functional variation in written discourse, belongs to this strong tradition. Earlier work on discourse analysis by Widdowson, register analysis by Halliday, analysis of doctor-patient consultation by Candlin and others, rhetorical-grammatical analyses of scientific discourse by Selinker, Trimble and others, genre analysis of research writing by Swales, and analysis of legislative provisions by Bhatia all belong to this tradition. On the other hand, one finds analyses of spoken and written discourse which have not been directly motivated by any applied concern, although some of them have found useful applications in language teaching and elsewhere. Much of the work cited under an extension of grammatical formalism, i.e., text-linguistics, genre analysis under the systemic tradition, will come under this. It is true that some of these, particularly the work of the associates of Halliday on genre analysis, have found useful applications in the teaching of writing to children. However, at the same time, we find Sinclair and Coulthard’s work on classroom discourse, which was initially motivated by applied concern but always had in mind an overriding concern for a general theory of discourse.

The fourth, and for our present purposes perhaps the most important, parameter along which much of discourse analysis can be distinguished, is that of surface-deep analysis, depending upon whether, or at what level, the analysis provides a thin or a thick (Geertz: 1973) description of language in use. This is particularly significant in the context of applied discourse analysis which has developed from a surface-level formal analysis to a deeper functional analysis, with a corresponding development in language teaching, which marks a movement from form to function, usage to use in Widdowson’s terms, grammar to discourse and communication in recent years. This is particularly noticeable in the case of English courses for a variety of specific or, as Swales recently put it, specifiable purposes. Models of discourse analysis have steadily changed in the past three decades (see Barber, 1962; Gustafsson, 1975; Selinker, Lackstrom, Trimble and others, 1972, 1974; Trimble, 1985; Swales, 1981a; Candlin et al., 1976, 1980; Tadros, 1981; Widdowson, 1983; Bhatia, 1982 for the range and variety of linguistic descriptions of language use), moving from a surface-level description to a more functional and grounded description of language use, often bringing in useful explanation of why a particular type of conventional codification of meaning is considered appropriate to a particular institutionalized socio-cultural setting. Insights from such discourse analyses have been extensively utilized in language teaching and still provide the main source of strength for ESP theory and practice. If we look at the history and development of applied discourse analysis in the last thirty years, we notice that it has progressed through at least four levels of linguistic description.

1.1 Surface-level linguistic description: register analysis

One of the earliest approaches to the description of varieties of language use, characterized in terms of what Reid (1956) called ‘register’, became the focus of widespread attention in the Sixties and of fierce controversy in the Seventies. Developed by Halliday et al. (1964), within the ‘institutional linguistics’ framework of Hill (1958), register analysis focuses mainly on the identification of statistically significant lexico-grammatical features of a linguistic variety. Halliday, McIntosh and Strevens (1964:87) postulated that language varies as its function varies; it differs in different situations. The name given to a variety of a language distinguished according to its use is register. They further claimed that registers could be differentiated as sub-codes of a particular language on the basis of the frequency of lexico-grammatical features of a particular text-variety. They also proposed three situational and contextual dimensions in terms of field, mode and style, which later became tenor of discourse to identify various registeral characteristics. Although these situational and contextual categories have been variously refined and redefined in Gregory (1967), Crystal and Davy (1969), Ellis and Ure (1969), Hasan (1973) and Gregory and Carroll (1978) etc., registers have been defined essentially in terms of lexico-grammatical and, more recently, in semantic and semiotic terms.

Three of the most significant analyses of language use for applied linguistic purposes which belong to this tradition are those of Barber (1962), Crystal and Davy (1969) and Gustaffsson (1975). They draw interesting conclusions about the linguistic/stylistic variation in different varieties.

These studies on the frequency of syntactic properties of different varieties of English are interesting and useful in the sense that they provide necessary empirical evidence to confirm or disprove some of the intuitive and impressionistic statements we all tend to make about the high or low incidence of certain syntactic features of various varieties of languages. However, such studies tell us very little about the restricted values these elements of syntax realize in specific varieties. In fact, they tell us nothing whatsoever about the aspects of the variety these syntactic elements textualize or to what purpose such features are markedly present or absent in a particular variety. The findings remain severely constrained by their emphasis on surface features and do not provide adequate insights about the way information is structured in a particular variety. However perceptive these observations may be, they fall some way short of offering an explanation of why a particular variety takes the form that it does, and it is reasonable to suppose that specialized language courses will be more effective for being informed by insights into the rationale underlying selection and distribution of surface linguistic features.

1.2 Functional language description: grammatical-rhetorical analysis

Grammatical-rhetorical analysis, as indicated in Selinker, Lackstrom and Trimble (1973:1), aims to investigate the relationship between grammatical choice and rhetorical function in written English for Science and Technology (EST). Selinker, Lackstrom, Trimble and others (1972, 1973, 1974), and Trimble (1985) begin by isolating two grammatical features, namely, tense and articles, which they thought were typical sources of difficulty for students of engineering – and also difficult to teach. Choices of tense and article were not solely dependent on syntactic and semantic considerations, but also involved rhetorical judgements, including the knowledge of the subject matter and its conventions. Substantiating their claim with real examples from scientific discourse, they conclude that whereas tense choices in general grammar of English are dependent on the notion of time, they are typically dependent on the notion of degree of generality in EST. Thus the present tense, they claim, is used to express generalization in EST and is used only where technical rhetoric requires the expression of this meaning. Investigating on similar lines the function of –en participles. in chemistry texts, Swales (1974) discovered that a given in phrases like ‘a given experiment’ or ‘a given temperature’ has two principle functions: one for clarifying the ‘status’ of the sentence, the other for specifying the ‘determiner range’ of the NP. Which of these functions operates is itself determined by whether the author is exemplifying or generalizing.

The most interesting aspect of these two studies of scientific writing is not their attempt to discover which linguistic features are more frequent, but their attempt to discover how specific linguistic features take on restricted values in the structuring of scientific communication. Insights such as these are gained by reference to subject-specific conventions and rhetorical considerations rather than to syntactic or semantic specifications. However, in grammatical-rhetorical analysis, the analyst typically tends to investigate discourse from the vantage point of the writer to consider how a scientist-communicator makes certain grammatical choices as he writes and somehow limits the level of analysis to certain specific syntactic features of these texts. In spite of the significant specific explanations discovered for the use of these syntactic features, the analysis yields only limited information on discourse structuring in scientific discourse. Therefore, inadequate information on these aspects of text-structuring often leads to misleading generalizations. The most significant case of this kind of misleading generalization has been the case of definitions in scientific discourse, which was given a privileged status in the rhetorical structure of scientific writing (see Widdowson, 1973; Selinker, Trimble and Trimble, 1976). Swales (1981b), however, points out that definitions are frequently used only in science text-books and examination answers and are rare in other forms of scientific academic discourse and, therefore, it is rather misleading to look upon them as part of the scientific competence of the scientist. They are better regarded as part of his communicative and pedagogic competence as a text-book writer. In many of the later studies belonging to this tradition (see Tarone et al., 1981; Swales, 1981a; Pettinari, 1982; Oster et al., 1981; etc.) there have been clear attempts to pay more attention to specific scientific genres than to a general register of science.

1.3 Language description as discourse: interactional analysis

Discourse analysis as interac...