27.4339, Review: English; Applied Ling; Discourse Analysis: Solly (2015)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-4339. Thu Oct 27 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.4339, Review: English; Applied Ling; Discourse Analysis: Solly (2015)

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Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2016 09:18:30
From: Ines Busch-Lauer [Ines.Busch.Lauer at fh-zwickau.de]
Subject: The Stylistics of Professional Discourse

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-198.html

AUTHOR: Martin  Solly
TITLE: The Stylistics of Professional Discourse
PUBLISHER: Edinburgh University Press
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Ines Busch-Lauer, Westsächsische Hochschule Zwickau

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

Martin Solly’s book “The Stylistics of Professional Discourse” is a
well-written and concisely structured overview of how stylistics evolved as a
linguistic discipline and how it currently determines the discourse in various
professional communities. In this context, the author also reflects on
globalisation and on the increasing use of English as a lingua franca with
impacts on its language dynamics. In particular, Solly draws on communication
in medicine and healthcare, legal contexts and education with chapters
specifically devoted to each of these domains as representative of the
author’s ongoing research on professional communities. The author refers to
early stylistics’ household books (e.g. Crystal & Davy 1969) as well as to
sociolinguistic aspects (e.g. Hymes 1996). Moreover, Solly considers the role
of other linguistic approaches to text and discourse pedagogy. The increasing
globalisation is also touched upon as is the impact of digitalization on the
the way experts communicate in and beyond their domains. Every chapter is
complemented by ACTIVITY assignments for readers to reflect on the individual
chapter’s content. In this respect, the book may also be a good reference
textbook on stylistics. 

Martin Solly’s main objective is to examine and illustrate how professional
groups like doctors, healthcare personnel, lawyers and educators demark their
identity. For this purpose, the monograph is made up of seven chapters and a
brief introduction into the book. 

The concept of “style” is the starting point for an elaborate discussion on
the background and current interpretation of stylistics. Chapter 1 therefore
considers the intrinsic relationship of style and stylistics, referring, for
example, to utterance and voice; written and spoken discourse; native and
non-native speaker characteristics as well as translation and interpreting.
Among the relevant linguistic approaches related to stylistics, Solly
identifies the following: Critical Discourse Analysis, Conversation Analysis,
Genre Analysis, Multimodal Discourse Analysis, Cognitive Linguistics,
Pragmatics and Speech Acts, Corpus-based Analysis, Narrative and
Story-telling. These theoretical foundations form the basis for the discussion
of professional discourse communities in Chapter 2. Here, Solly applies
results of sociolinguistics (Hymes) to stylistics, and describes both speech
communities and communities of practice, i.e. people working in the same
domain of human endeavour. Following an explorative investigation on the
communities’ nature, he finally arrives at professional communities and their
language competences. In this context, academic literacy and professional
identity, as well as English as an unequal global language, are described.
Moreover, some examples of discursive identity, multimodality and pragmatics
are considered. The chapter closes with some interesting remarks about
Sarangi’s notion of the analyst’s paradox and that it might be hard for a
linguist to properly understand distinct communication processes of a specific
domain. 

Chapter 3 examines language and genre use in medicine and healthcare. In its
first part, Solly outlines some of the changes that took place in medicine and
healthcare communication over the last decade. For that purpose, he uses
examples to illustrate features of style in patient information leaflets and
in case studies, as well as in doctor-patient communication. He then touches
upon international healthcare insurance issues and illustrates the changes to
be observed in communicating about illnesses such as AIDS. He states that
better patient literacy through Internet sources and teamwork collaboration
are two decisive aspects that will influence doctor-patient communication in
the future and make it an interesting field of further research for applied
linguists.

Chapter 4 focuses on legal settings, the courtroom, statutes, witness reports
and forensic linguistics. First, short paragraphs briefly refer to the
relation between law and language. Then cultural stereotypes in the field, as
well as the role of English in various legal systems, are briefly
characterized. Solly again reflects on the domain by examining three different
legal language modes: written, spoken-composed and spoken-spontaneous.
Therefore, the legal style is both frozen, formal and consultative. Moreover,
Solly examines the relation between vagueness and precision in legal style.
Adjectives, for example, are  used in both evaluative and vague statements,
i.e. they can be precise and open for interpretations. This specific feature
of legal discourse can only be understood by domain specialists as a result of
their conventional professional use of such phrases. Moreover, Solly considers
the role of other grammatical categories such as determiners, tenses and
modality that lead to the repetitive and fairly frozen, formal legal style.
Stylistically, repetition in word doublings and hierarchy also play a
significant role. Moreover, legal language in the courtroom is particularly
repetitive and formal, e.g. as can be seen in the witnesses’ oath, the
lawyers’ questioning of witnesses in court and legal power exercising. Solly
provides evidence for this by well-chosen samples.

Stylistics of educational discourse is the main subject of Chapter 5. Again,
Solly first outlines the domain characteristics and then exemplifies three
types of educational discourse: (i) the language of educational reform in the
U.K. and Europe; (ii) the language of primary school job adverts and (iii) the
language of commencement speeches in American universities. 

Following this brief overview of discourse particularities in the three
domains, it becomes clear that stylistics has a key role in the appropriate
use of language for specific purposes in the various professional communities
and domains.

Chapter 6 examines the effects of technological innovations on communicative
practice. Solly examines the style of e-mails, below-the-line comments, blogs
and social media like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Since the future impact
of the Internet seems hard to predict, Solly leaves the reader with some
questions open, referring to handwriting becoming obsolete and machine
translation becoming established as standard procedure.

Chapter 7 finally addresses the teaching of professional discourse, e.g.
Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and English Medium Instruction
(EMI). It then refers to the stylistic toolkit applied by professionals in
communication. Here the reader is introduced to the functionality of
foregrounding, metaphor and discourse marker use, the effects of deixis,
parallelism and phatic bonding. Finally, Solly chooses trademarks as a genre
to demonstrate the intertwining of various stylistic means and texts suitable
to teach stylistic analysis.

The conclusion “Coda: new trends and future directions” briefly provides the
author’s main statements on the future developments of professional language
use. Martin Solly hopes that his analyses in his book will spur interest in a
stylistic approach to professional text and discourse.

EVALUATION

Overall, Martin Solly’s book addresses a wide range of topics setting
stylistics at the very centre of linguistic analysis, clearly delimiting its
origin and relations to other linguistic approaches. To cover three major
domains, however, seems problematic to the reviewer, since only some specific
features could be addressed in the respective chapters. Each domain would
deserve an entire volume to cover its  aspects relevant to written and oral
texts and professional communities. In particular this is true for the medical
and legal domains. They are very dynamic with lots of interdisciplinary
interactions between experts, researchers and practitioners as well as
expert-layperson communication. So it might be too difficult and too early to 
to draw general conclusions just from Solly’s examples of professional
communities. In this respect, the book seems to be introductory and therefore
valuable for students of applied linguistics as well as for novice
communicators in the three professional domains. Moreover, Solly’s
investigations seem to rely more on random qualitative observation than on
consistent corpus analysis. The latter might even reveal some guidelines for
the proper use of style in the various professional domains which could
support professionals, in particular non-native speakers of English, in using
their English language skills more consistently. 

Covering a wide range of topics, Solly’s volume effectively demonstrates the
complexity of stylistic analysis and interpretation in texts. In that respect,
the volume clearly reaches its objective. The target audience will definitely
benefit from the content, also gaining insights into research in other related
disciplines like sociolinguistics and language for specific purposes. The
author offers plenty of references to household books and to current research.
The activity assignments at the end of each chapter definitely contribute to
self-instructed further reading and research proposals into stylistics.
Overall, the book is a valuable source of linguistic research on stylistics,
addressing both scholars in applied linguistics and the respectively reviewed
disciplines as well as students of stylistics and professional discourse
analysis. Martin Solly offers a concise argument to continue research on the
dynamic field of professional discourse in different domains.

REFERENCES

Crystal, D. and Davy, D. (1969). Investigating English style. London: Longman.

Hymes, D. (1996). Ethnography, linguistics, narrative inequality: Toward an
understanding of voice. London: Taylor and Francis.

Saragani, S. (2914). Experts on experts: the analysts’s paradox, ist
conditions and consequences. Pleanry lecture delivered on 19 June 2014 at the
interntional conference on The Language of Medicien: Science, Practrice and
Academia, held at the University of Bergamo, Italy.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Ines-A. Busch-Lauer is Professor of English (Applied Linguistics) and
Communication at the University of Applied Sciences in Zwickau/ Germany. Her
main fields of research comprise English and German specialized communication
in various domains (especially in technical subjects, business, medicine,
linguistics), the study of texts and genres, contrastive rhetorics and
intercultural communication, academic writing in English, LSP didactics and
style. She is a member of the editorial board of Fachsprache. International
Journal of Specialized Communication published by facultas, Vienna. In this
role, she is responsible for review management and compiles the biannual
bibliography of recent publications on languages for specific purposes’
research.





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