25.473, Review: Discourse Analysis; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Gotti & Sancho Guinda (2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-473. Wed Jan 29 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.473, Review: Discourse Analysis; Text/Corpus Linguistics: Gotti & Sancho Guinda (2013)

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Rajiv Rao, U of Wisconsin Madison
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Mateja Schuck, U of Wisconsin Madison
Anja Wanner, U of Wisconsin Madison
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Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2014 09:47:26
From: Barbara Clark [barb at you-say-tomato.com]
Subject: Narratives in Academic and Professional Genres

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-900.html

EDITOR: Maurizio Gotti
EDITOR: Carmen Sancho Guinda
TITLE: Narratives in Academic and Professional Genres
SERIES TITLE: Linguistic Insights - Volume 172
PUBLISHER: Peter Lang AG
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Barbara L. Clark, Queen Mary, University of London

SUMMARY
This edited volume opens with a brief foreword from Vijay K. Bhatia
introducing what is to follow. The book begins properly with a theoretically
focused introduction by the editors which serves to both justify the volume
and locate it within several different approaches to the study of situated
language use. As the authors write, ‘we believe that by applying the tools and
foci of Narratology to the study of academic and professional genres we may
enrich their description and contribute to deepen into their interpersonal
workings, synergising theoretical positions and opening research windows that
otherwise would be less prominent in specialised communication’ (13). This
goal has largely, and successfully, been achieved by the 11 chapters focusing
on academic genres in the first part of the book, and by the 10 chapters
focusing on professional genres in the second part.

Although the chapters are not numbered in the volume, I use chapter numbers to
refer to them (in order of their appearance in the book) for ease of
reference.

Chapter 1, Anna Mauranen’s ‘Narrative elements in conference presentations’
argues that narratives in conference presentations add rhetorical power to the
presentations. Data is drawn from the English as a Lingua Franca in Academic
Settings (ELFA) corpus. However, due to the small data sample used, it would
be difficult to generalise findings beyond the specific scope of the chapter.

Chapter 2, Begoña Bellés Fortuño’s ‘Marginal stories in classroom asides’
investigates a lesser-studied phenomenon but, like Chapter 1, has a small data
sample and even more problematically makes assertions which such a small
sample does not necessarily support. For example, the author writes, ‘This
study has shown that asides are recurrent pragmatic features in academic
lectures’ (74). Given that the data come from only four academic lectures,
this assertion seems a bit too broad for this chapter. The author might have
amended the claim to reflect the data which was analysed for the chapter.

Chapter 3, Christine Feak’s ‘Narrative in and of public meetings of the
university’ uses observation of and official minutes from four open public
meetings in a major US university to argue that despite the apparent
transparency in their activities, the board meetings appear to be more of a
ritual through which identities are preserved through embedded narratives. The
chapter is coherent and well argued, a pleasure to read.

Chapter 4, Yiannis Gabriel’s ‘Storytelling in organizational research’
examines some of the main genres of stories recounted by academics, and seeks
to understand how stories function in academic discourses and the role they
play in creating solidarity. Data collection and analysis draws on the
author’s life experience. This methodology forces the reader to trust that the
author has the experience and authority in the academy to substantiate any
assertions made in the analysis.

Chapter 5, Marina Bondi’s ‘Historians as recounters: Description across
genres’ uses corpus linguistic methods to provide a well-argued discussion of
theorising how people describe objects and places in different research
traditions. However, due to the limits of the corpora from which data is
drawn, results of any analysis should not be generalised.

Chapter 6, Carmen Daniela Maier and Jan Engberg’s ‘Tendencies in the
multimodal evolution of narrator’s types and roles in research genres’
considers the relationship between mode of transmission of research knowledge
(traditional printed academic journal article and multimodal academic video
essays). Like many of the chapters in the volume, the small data sample makes
it difficult to generalise findings. However, this chapter was well argued
with good evidence to support assertions.

In Chapter 7, ‘Narratives in academic blogs’, María José Luzón explores the
various reasons why and results of uses of narratives in blogs written by
academics. She argues that academics use narratives strategically to create
intimacy with readers, for self-preservation management, and for validation of
the self.

Chapter 8, Rosa Lorés-Sanz’s ‘Enhancing membership and constructing knowledge
in Spanish and English book reviews’, argues that academic book reviews have
features which characterise typical narratives, and investigates cultural
influences on evaluations of these narratives. This chapter is well argued,
and makes a solid and interesting contribution to intercultural pragmatics.

Chapter 9, Pilar Mur Dueñas’s ‘Scholars recounting their own research in
journal articles’ finds differences between English-language and
Spanish-language research articles in personal references and agency,
adverbial clauses, and verb tenses. Though it is not clear that the two data
sources are directly comparable (English-language articles are from high
impact journals; Spanish-language articles are from low impact journals),
findings from this analysis may assist Spanish-language scholars wanting to
publish in English-language journals.

In Chapter 10, ‘Narrative structure in students’ scientific writing’,
Christoph A. Hafner, Lindsay Miller, and Connie Ng Kwai-Fun have two goals: to
consider how teachers of English for Science and Technology (EST) can help
their students to write for audiences outside of academia whilst maintaining
appropriate academic criticality and rigour; and how teachers of EST can work
with both newer digital media and traditional written media whilst
acknowledging the power that such traditional written forms still have in
scientific disciplines. The authors found that using a popular science genre
(digital storytelling) in the dissemination of scientific research helped EST
students themselves to make the science more accessible to non-specialist
audiences, which helped EST students’ own academic writing.

Chapter 11, Luisa Caiazzo’s ‘Factual reporting in the “About” page of British
university websites’ uses qualitative and quantitative corpus linguistic
methodologies to investigate the emerging narrative patterns in ‘About’ pages
on 115 British university websites. Another focus of the chapter is to
investigate the interplay between factual and evaluative self-representation
in the narratives, which Caiazzo argues can be viewed as institutional writing
(cf. Biber 2006).
 
The second half of the book is comprised of studies focusing on narratives in
professional genres, and begins with Kjersti Fløttum’s ‘Narratives in reports
about climate change’. This chapter investigates how multiple actors involved
in climate change linguistic and discursively construct their climate policy,
in three reports published by large international institutions. The chapter
also seeks to gain a deeper understanding of climate change discourse from a
narrative analytic perspective.

Chapter 13, Françoise Salager-Meyer, María Ángeles Alcaraz Ariza, and
Marianela Luzardo Briceño’s ‘The medical narrative from a diachronic
perspective (1840-2009): Titling practices and authorship’ claims to be the
first study of the evolution of case report narrative titles. In their
diachronic analysis of a corpus of 180 case report narrative titles from 1840
to 2009, the authors seek to develop a sense of the collaborative practices of
medical case report narrative writers.

Chapter 14, Marco De Martino’s ‘Illness narratives: Gender and identity in
patients’ accounts’ aims to discover gendered differences (i.e., differences
in femininities and masculinities) in illness narratives, specifically if men
and women ‘do’ gender and illness differently, and if so, what some of these
differences are. In contrast with Charteris-Black and Seale (2010), data for
this chapter are oncological conditions affecting primary and secondary sexual
organs. The author cites research from the 1990s (e.g., Bem 1993; Connell
1995; Tannen 1991) to support the focus on gendered differences. However,
there is a large amount of research on gender, identity, and language (e.g.,
Bucholtz & Hall 2004; Mills & Mullany 2011) that has developed (some may
argue, progressed) the field and has shifted the focus of research toward
sociocultural, ideological, and indexical influences on gender and identity
construction. Such research argues that gender and identity construction is
nuanced, contextual, and not always a matter of simple binaries. However,
gender differences in discourse and narrative are compelling, and continue to
be the focus of study (cf. Baker 2008).

Chapter 15, Ruth Breeze’s ‘Traversing legal narratives’ focuses on the central
legal narrative genre of the judgment which ‘represents the culmination of
legal action’, and follows the ‘natural history’ of the narratives embedded in
it (344). The author draws on Bruner’s (1991) distinction between narrative
and argumentative approaches to reality, arguing that the framework of the law
ultimately sets the parameters for what can be considered a tellable legal
story; additionally, logical argument is always superordinate to legal
narratives. The chapter argues that certain legal authorities (e.g., judges,
lawyers) play important roles in the intertextual construction and
re-construction of legal narratives, and sets out major differences between
legal and other narrative forms.

Chapter 16, Patrizia Anesa’s ‘Multiple narratives in arbitration processes’
highlights a reason for the lack of research in this important area: that
arbitrators and parties involved frequently wish to keep narratives,
discussions, and details of the arbitration confidential. Using the minutes of
arbitral hearings and transcripts of parties’ examinations, the chapter seeks
to understand to what extent arbitration proceedings are shaped by narratives;
what stories are told by participants in arbitration; and how multiple voices
heard in arbitration proceedings merge. Data come from documents in Italian
domestic arbitration cases and despite the small data sample, the author
argues that findings from the analysis could contribute some new insights into
a specific type of arbitral hearing, namely the free parties’ examination.

Chapter 17, Carmen Sancho Guinda’s ‘The “Tell and Show” of
aviation-catastrophe synopses’ argues that certain texts produced by the
National Transportation Safety Board of the United States (NTSB) have
storytelling elements in which attribution plays a significant role in both
constructing relationships between narrator and audience and to the
organisation of discourse in the text. After a discussion of the main features
of Genre Theory, the chapter investigates NTSB aviation accidents’ narrative
authorship and adequacy.

In Chapter 18, ‘Getting the picture in annual reports: A reflection on the
genre-based analysis of photographic narrative’, Elizabeth De Groot argues
that photographs that appear alongside text constitute manifestations of the
narrative included in companies’ annual reports. The chapter aims to shed
light on the complex nature of analysing photographic narrative, and to
provide tools grounded in Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) genre theory
that will allow for ‘systematic and consistent’ examination of multimodal
narrative manifestations (413).

Chapter 19, Isabel Corona Marzol’s ‘Lives in retrospective: The journalistic
obituary’ approaches the printed journalistic obituary as a multimodal text
which is a composite of different units, each of which contributes different
meaning-making resources to the obituary as a whole. The analysis seeks to
identify and understand the different units that make up multimodal obituary
texts in a corpus comprised of 200 printed obituaries from four leading
British newspapers.

Chapter 20, Ismael Arinas Pellón’s ‘Motivation for descriptions of
intellectual property’ describes US patents, aiming to consider what they are,
what validity criteria they must fulfil, and what contexts influence their
writing. Arinas Pellón draws on several methodologies including genre
analysis, corpus linguistics, and narratology. The chapter concludes with a
discussion of why descriptions are the main form of transforming an invention
into a tradable property, and how such a claimed property is described in a
way that meets the commercial interests of the patent applicants.

In the concise Afterword, Brian Paltridge calls for an increased use of
narrative inquiry in academic and professional genres, in order to help
understand how people who work in these areas develop their expertise in the
use of these genres, how people learn to participate in them, and the issues
they face in doing so.

EVALUATION
The book is sure to appeal to scholars interested in applied linguistic
anthropology research, as many of the chapters focus on topics which have
heretofore received little linguistic attention. Those interested in narrative
studies are also likely to be interested in the volume, given the many
different approaches to and theoretical discussions of ‘narrative’. Moreover,
the volume will likely appeal to scholars in English for Special Purposes
(ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP), given the variety of ESP and
EAP topics and situations which are included for analysis.

The editors aimed to offer ‘an engaging panorama of the construction of
specialised discourses and practices within academia and diverse professional
communities’, according to the blurb on the back of the book, and for the most
part this goal has been achieved. Sancho Guinda’s chapter on aviation
catastrophe synopses is striking, given the paucity of work on aviation
discourse (my own area of research), particularly accident and incident
narratives. It is a welcome addition to the small (but growing) body of
aviation discourse scholarship. Indeed, many of the chapters discussed topics
which have previously received little linguistic attention (e.g., Maier and
Engberg on multimodality and academic narratives; Anesa on narratives in
arbitration; Arinas Pellón on US patents).

The book is not without a few minor issues. Many chapters were difficult to
follow, either because of poor editing, typos, or other problems. The book
felt like it was hastily completed, which may account for the editing errors
and typos. In fact, in the review copy, a page from one of the chapters (from
the bibliography) was missing from the bound book, and was included as a
supplement. These issues are unacceptable with a list price of
US$124.95/£77/€96.07.

These issues aside, the book is an interesting and useful resource for
narrative-focused research into areas that have traditionally been
understudied.

REFERENCES
Bem, Sandra. 1993. The lenses of gender: transforming the debate on sexual
inequality. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Biber, Douglas. 2006. University language. A corpus-based study of written
registers. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Bruner, Jerome. 1991. The narrative construction of reality. Critical Inquiry
19. 1-21.

Bucholtz, Mary & Kira Hall. 2004. Theorizing identity in language and
sexuality research. Language in Society 33. 469-515.

Charteris-Black, Jonathan & Clive Seale. 2010. Gender and the language of
illness. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Connell, Robert W. 1995. Masculinities. Berkeley: University of California
Press.

Mills, Sara & Louise Mullany. 2011. Language, gender, and feminism: theory,
methodology and practice. London: Routledge.

Tannen, Deborah. 1991. You just don’t understand: women and men in
conversation. London: Virago.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Barbara Clark is a linguistic anthropologist specialising in institutional
discourse, intercultural communication, miscommunication, and aviation
discourse. She holds a Visiting Research Fellow position at Queen Mary,
University of London, and is founder of You Say Tomato which provides
linguistic anthropology consulting services.



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