Language And Discipline Perspectives On Academic Discourse

This book represents the physical outcome of the symposium “Academic Voices in Contrast”, organised at the University of Bergen, Norway, in May 2006. The symposium, focusing on recent research within the field of academic discourse, was initiated and organised by the KIAP project (Cultural Identity in Academic Prose; see www.uib.no/kiap/). In this project, a special focus has been put on the study of the voice(s) of the academic author, in the doubly contrastive perspective of language and discipline. A narrow selection of distinguished scholars were invited to participate at the symposium. They were asked to address issues related to “traditional” linguistic versus contextual approaches or to interlingual and interdisciplinary similarities and differences in academic discourse. By the papers of the following, the symposium and the present book constitute a clear advancement of the research on academic discourse: M. A. A. Ariza, L. Berge, M. Bondi, S. V. Bonn, S. Carter-Thomas, T. Dahl, K. Fløttum, A. M. Gjesdal, F. Grossmann, K. Hyland, T. Kinn, L. Lundquist, A. Mauranen, M. Pabón, E. Rowley-Jolivet, F. Salager-Meyer, P. Shaw, J. M. Swales, J.L. Tønnesson, E. T. Vold, F. Wirth.

The goal of this volume is to examine academic discourse (AD) from cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspectives. The adjective "Cross-cultural" in the volume title is not just limited to national contexts but also includes a cross-disciplinary perspective. Twelve scientific fields are under scrutiny in the articles. One of the unique aspects of the volume is the inclusion of a variety of foreign languages (English (as a lingua franca), Spanish, French, Swedish, Russian, German, Italian, and Norwegian). Besides, in several articles dealing with oral AD, comparisons and parallels are also established with written AD. The research methodologies used in the studies are varied and they offer an overview of the diversity and richness of approaches to AD. All in all, it is hoped that the volume appeals not only to young researchers but also to confirmed scholars interested in cross-linguistic and cross-cultural aspects of AD. It will also be of interest to language teachers or teachers who are involved with e.g. international students and academic mobility.

This volume reflects the emerging interest in cross-disciplinary variation in both spoken and written academic English, exploring the conventions and modes of persuasion characteristic of different disciplines and which help define academic inquiry. This collection brings together chapters by applied linguists and EAP practitioners from seven different countries. The authors draw on various specialised spoken and written corpora to illustrate the notion of variation and to explore the concept of discipline and the different methodologies they use to investigate these corpora. The book also seeks to make explicit the valuable links that can be made between research into academic speech and writing as text, as process, and as social practice.

Why do engineers "report" while philosophers "argue" and biologists "describe"? In the Michigan Classics Edition of Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in AcademicWriting, Ken Hyland examines the relationships between the cultures of academic communities and their unique discourses. Drawing on discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and the voices of professional insiders, Ken Hyland explores how academics use language to organize their professional lives, carry out intellectual tasks, and reach agreement on what will count as knowledge. In addition, Disciplinary Discourses presents a useful framework for understanding the interactions between writers and their readers in published academic writing. From this framework, Hyland provides practical teaching suggestions and points out opportunities for further research within the subject area. As issues of linguistic and rhetorical expression of disciplinary conventions are becoming more central to teachers, students, and researchers, the careful analysis and straightforward style of Disciplinary Discourses make it a remarkable asset. The Michigan Classics Edition features a new preface by the author and a new foreword by John M. Swales.

Ken Hyland draws on a number of sources to explore how authors convey aspects of their identities within the constraints placed upon them by their disciplines' rhetorical conventions. He promotes corpus methods as important tools in identity research.

Drawing on genre analysis and corpus linguistics, the book brings together studies on a genre that is becoming one of the most important in present-day research communication. The chapters are organised into three sections focusing on language and genre variation across cultures and disciplines, as well as on recent language and genre change.

Academic discourse is the principle means by which knowledge is constituted in the world today and English is the globalized language in and through which such knowledge most often gets constructed and transmitted. Be it in the form of specialized books, disciplinary journals, international congresses or university lectures, the influence and power of such discourse is enormous. Most students and scholars, however, concern themselves almost exclusively with 'what' is written or said within such discourse, ignoring the often more important question of 'how' what is written or said is expressed or received. This book analyzes and contrasts ways in which writers from the disciplines of History and Economics present themselves and their knowledge claims to their readers, in an attempt to understand how common lexico-grammatical and pragmatic elements of texts act to persuade the readers of the knowledge claims being brought forth, as well as to see how the writers position themselves as they are making these claims. The work investigates the way academic writers construct disciplinary identity through display of their ideas or assumptions, the persuasive forms of argumentation they employ and how they represent themselves and others in their texts. In doing so, it aims as well to establish the consistency and the effects of such disciplinary identity by highlighting a few of the ideological and epistemological consequences of the choices made by each of the disciplinary (or discourse) communities.

This book explores how the voices of authors and other researchers are manifested in academic discourse, and how the author handles the polyphonic interaction between these various parties. It represents a unique study of academic discourse in that it takes a doubly contrastive approach, focusing on the two factors of discipline and language at the same time. It is based on a large electronic corpus of 450 research articles from three disciplines (economics, linguistics and medicine) in three languages (English, French and Norwegian). The book investigates whether disciplines and languages may be said to represent different cultures with regard to person manifestation in the texts. What is being studied is thus cultural identities as tendencies in linguistic practices. For the majority of the features focused on (e.g. metatext and bibliographical references), the discipline factor turns out to contribute more strongly to the variation observed than the language factor. However, for some of the features (e.g. pronouns and negation), the language factor is also quite strong. Additional background information on the investigations reported in this book can be found at www.uib.no/kiap/.