27.4342, Review: Discourse Analysis; General Ling: Cacchiani, Mazzi, Bondi (2015)

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Subject: 27.4342, Review: Discourse Analysis; General Ling: Cacchiani, Mazzi, Bondi (2015)

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Date: Thu, 27 Oct 2016 13:50:41
From: Kelly Wright [kelly.wright at uky.edu]
Subject: Discourse In and Through the Media: Recontextualizing and Reconceptualizing Expert Discourse

 
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EDITOR: Marina  Bondi
EDITOR: Silvia  Cacchiani
EDITOR: Davide  Mazzi
TITLE: Discourse In and Through the Media: Recontextualizing and Reconceptualizing Expert Discourse
PUBLISHER: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Kelly E Wright, University of Kentucky

Reviews Editor: Robert A. Cote

This edited collection entitled “Review of Discourse In and Through the Media:
Recontextualizing and Reconceptualizing Expert Discourse” by Marina Bondi,
Silvia Cacchiani, and Davide Mazzi. is a result of extensive collaboration
between Italian universities and the CLAVIER center. The works collected here
were selected because of their specific treatment of the avenues through which
expert discourse is packaged and disseminated through popular media. These
works approach the following arching research questions from various
perspectives: How is knowledge communicated to a wider audience? How is expert
knowledge expressed in a way which conveys its relevance to the lay listener?
“How far do the media actually mediate” (vi)? The 2013 conference these papers
rose from focused on recontextualization and reconceptualization and explored
these questions through participant structures, cross-cultural commonalities,
point of view, multimodality, and topic popularization. 

Section 1: New Media and New Multidimensional Environments for Knowledge
Dissemination sets the stage of this conversation by taking on scholarly
communication in and through the digital media and interactive environments
and outlining the stakes of navigating these spaces. Here, Cornelius Puschmann
in “A Digital Mob in the Ivory Tower? Context Collapse in Scholarly
Communication Online” treats the ways in which experts react to content
collapse, citing heated debate over research that had been “poorly reported”
(23). This debate is highlighted in the chapter through several case studies,
most recognizable among them being the 2014 Facebook study, which created a
surging backlash against open access to metadata and created a subsequent a
subsequent public conversation about online privacy. Puschmann charts the
evolution of “science communication,” focusing on the historical development
of a scientist’s accountability to the public which came to the fore in the
early 20th century (24). The digital world has reshaped and broadened this
accountability. Puschmann holds that current scholars interested in
disseminating their findings—and warnings—to the public will participate in
the creation of a new, “diversif[ied] and consolidate[d]” genre (25). 

Jan Engberg and Carmen Daniela Maier in “Exploring the Hypermodal
Communication of Academic Knowledge Beyond Generic Structure” go on to
conceptualize the development of this genre using one article from the Article
of the Future Project (AotFP) as a case study to highlight the literacies
surrounding this new mode. The AotFP is an archive of the possible, set up “to
revolutionize the traditional format of the research article” in new, digital
spaces (46). The authors advocate bringing fluency to the fore as the field
works towards seamless and efficient scientific communication across all
domains. In the AotFP’s view, understanding “multimodal literacy” is the way
forward for researchers hoping to bridge the communications gap between
well-intentioned research and well-intentioned reporting (48). Multimodal
literacy takes the average viewer’s interactive space into account from a
project’s inception, making presentation and reception as essential as
efficacy and rational application in methodology. Engberg and Maier hold that
this new genre is one which stands astride pop science and scholarly
publication. Developing the characteristics of this genre will fertilize this
literacy, enabling the AofFP’s stated goals (54). 

Section 2: Disseminating Scholarly Knowledge observes how the experts who
created the experiments can utilize this new space to emphasize the
dissemination of scholarly knowledge. In this vein, Susan Hunston reviews 18
BBC radio broadcasts looking for successful patterns of persuasion techniques
and balance in scientific communication in “Talking Science: Science in the
News on BBC Radio.” Specifically, she looked for researchers who were able to
“manipulate the concept of status to stress their roles as interpreters of
evidence” (66). This strategy allows the researcher to avoid their
presentation being viewed as talking down to the listener, while also
strengthening their personal ethos in reporting and stressing the validity and
importance of the results themselves. Hunston presents a pilot study using a
participant structure strategy looking for “evidentials and status markers”
through the role of interviewer, programme maker, researcher, and listener
(89). She suggests a deliberate move away from implication and councils
researchers to state results clearly from a reporter’s perspective. 

Elsa Pic and Gregory Furmaniak in “Comparison as a Mode of
Re-Conceptualization in Popularization: Focus on Expressions of Similarity”
present part of a larger project that compares research articles with popular
science writing. Here, the authors present findings of different patterns of
similarity expression between the two modes. The authors compiled a
1,000,000-word corpus of British English from 2000-2012 for this study (99).
Similarity is an ideal subject of study in a corpus of this type because,
“with comparisons, there is always a marker of comparison” (95). Pic and
Furmaniak are looking at inter-domain comparison (similes) versus intra-domain
comparison, which necessitates sophisticated syntactic and semantic analysis
(116). Intra-domain comparison is stated to be entirely grammatical and rests
on a “Figure/Ground” structure (96), which the authors hone in on by using
specific discursive adjectives often employed in explication or metadiscourse.
They find that while comparison is often used to aid the lay audience, it is
not the most common use of comparison structures (simile or figure/ground).
They suggest an expansion of this research with a larger number of comparative
markers. 

Stefania Maci also presents an analysis of grammatical difference, looking at
that-structures on medical posters to investigate the types of verbs used in
this medium in “‘These Data Supported the Provocative View That…’:Evaluation
in Medical Academic Posters.” This poster genre is “highly prized” was a
medium for a “transfer” of academic discourse (119). To facilitate this
analysis, Maci compiled a corpus of poster abstracts from recognizable
databases, such as PUBMED. Maci looks at how verb choice conveys reliability
and concludes that the most successful “evaluative stance in all posters is
realized as offering the highest degree of certainty and objectivity,
regardless of the source of evaluation or evaluative entity.” Put differently,
“there seems to be no need for persuasion when the facts speak for
themselves,” an assertion which Maci supports with negative evidence (140). 

Sections 3: Knowledge Dissemination from Institution to Lay Audience and 4:
New Media in Corporate Communication focus on knowledge transmission and
opinion formation in institutional and corporate interactions with lay
audiences. In view of this domain, Alison Duguid in “Public Apologies and
Media Evaluations” employed multiple, massive corpora to evaluate how the
media judges the effectivity of apology by creating a “mediated channel”
unlike any other for such utterances (146). Public apology is the epitome of
performative public and general discourse, and journalists latch on to such
utterances from start to finish—calling for them to occur, creating space for
them the resound, assessing their worth, and informing the (present and
future) public’s interpretation of them. This is a phenomenon unlike any
other.

While Duguid’s assessments stand somewhat aside the tenor the rest of this
volume holds, her elucidations of the very real and increasingly forceful
ability of the media to orchestrate public opinion of the information it
shares is highly illustrative. Her results show surprisingly little change
over time in “apology-related lexis,” from popular to academic print, from
recorded speech to digital publication; all forms of public apology seem to
fit a general pattern, one designed and controlled by the media itself (146).
This is essential knowledge for any researcher hoping to successfully
negotiate this “mediated space” and explicate the true nature of their
findings in a way which fosters lay understanding and acceptance. 

Ilaria Moschini sites another institutional-to-lay discourse phenomenon in the
White House Facebook page. In “Facebook.com/WhiteHouse: A Multimodal Analysis
of the Social Media Recontextualization of the Institutional Encoder” she
argues that the White House Facebook pages creates “a form of hybridized
textuality” by looking at how official language has been recontextualized in
this digital, personal space (170). This institution has a voice now, one
which expresses itself without the characteristic midwifery of the traditional
media outlet and does so with (arguably) overall success. Moschini claims that
the shift between these two forms of dialogue (institutional and lay),
intertwined with the daily use of social media, has produced a new set of
semiotic patterns that have “materialized postmodernism” and “the new cultural
logic of modern society” (176). This observation delimits an interesting
approach for the scholar interested in reaching the lay audience directly,
with control of message, from a legitimate platform. 

Further chapters cite other examples of this new materialized postmodernism.
Carmen Sancho Guinda in “Digital Vividness” Reporting Aviation Disasters
Online” uses US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) annual reports to
illustrate an effective blend of technical reporting and storytelling (187)
and claims that the vividness used in description of catastrophes is an
excellent “instructional tool.” Giuliana Elena Garzone in “Social Media in
Corporate Communication: Focus on Text and Discourse” addresses how business
communication is constructed differently across various platforms and media
(214). She discusses how the introduction of tools for website design have
fragmented the social feedback cycle. In “From Corporate Websites to Consumer
Blogs: A Corpus-Driven Analysis of the Recontextualization of Brand Identity
in Fashion Discourse” Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli endeavors to reveal “the
linguistic expression of brand identity” and its subsequent
recontextualization as popular expressions of brand loyalty (242). This study
was far reaching, capturing a wide literature review, and applying these
theoretical bases to a corpus study. Camiciottoli chose to focus on fashion
blogs, which represent “online communities of consumers” from three separate
Italian fashion houses. The adjectives used in these blogs provide a targeted
catalogue of the evaluative behavior of interest. The author sites many
markers of successful branding gleaned from this corpus study, one example
providing an ability to track when the same adjectives used in advertising are
repeated in the blogosphere. She concludes by claiming that these
“user-friendly corpus techniques” may be useful for marketing firms to apply
in the future (259). 

This volume concludes in Section 5: Empowering the Audience with the
discussion on recontextualization and a focus on audience empowerment. In
“‘I’m Not an Expert’: Lay Knowledge, its Construction and Dissemination in
Personal Weblogs” Peter Schildhauer looks at lay knowledge directly,
underscoring the processes the lay community uses to disseminate its beliefs
and experiences throughout its own networks. To do this, he created a
diachronic blog corpus (DIABLOC) and proceeded with a qualitative assessment
of dual narration-reflection structure (269). Schildhauer is most interested
in determining whether or not we can characterize the communicative purpose of
this everyday genre as knowledge dissemination (266). After presenting an
accounting of the methodological background and some preliminary corpus
findings, the author relates an illustrative case study in which he assesses
the macro- and micro-linguistics structures of narrative-reflection and
if-then clauses, lexemes marking intentionality and relevance, the presence of
“lay theories” relaying purpose, and gender perspective (284). Schildhauer
holds that these “lay theories” arise from personal experience, and that they
indeed represent knowledge dissemination (279). 

Judith Turnbull looks at lay in “Knowledge Dissemination online: The Case for
health Information”. This volume is interested overall in communication
between experts and lay people, but health communication is a specialized type
because it has a different, and important, purpose of immediate interest,
occurring in the context of necessity. Because of this, much of the health
information from experts on the internet takes on a shade of “info-suasion”
(299), which provides accurate information aimed at shaping the behavior of
individuals. Turnbull argues that lay communication of health information
takes a similar form, and to support this claim she has analyzed three
diabetes websites to determine the linguistic features of this specialized
discourse. She concludes that much use is made of the “multimodal affordances”
the digital platform brings to convey empathy and relevance of individual
experience to a mass, diverse public (310). By comparing the lay and expert
discourses on these sites over time, Turnbull is able to show that “the expert
system of knowledge [increasingly] exploits lay knowledge” dissemination
tactics. 

In the final chapter, “From Usage Guides to Wikipedia: Re-Contextualizing the
Discourse of Language Use”, Morana Lukač and Robert Gutounig address the
differences in conversation around correct language use over time,
particularly in the distances between prescriptive rules and general
conversation. To further this comparison in a contemporary vein, the authors
analyze Wikipedia articles and Talk pages in comparison to current usage
guides in the extensive database. These assessments were made based on several
general topics of English usage discussion which lend themselves to a
diachronic study, namely split infinitives and preposition stranding. Their
results show that usage articles are among those with the highest traffic on
Wikipedia, and that because of the site’s principles of operation, they have a
more reference-genre tone; user guides are more conversational and often
present individual opinion (339). The authors conclude that the Wikipedia data
shows that fluid communication is possible between the expert and lay sphere,
but outside the conversational domain of language use, the space may not be as
welcoming; they suggest that expansion of the domain of comparison is called
for. 

EVALUATION

The challenges that this volume addresses are age-old but are recently
beginning to reach an observable definition. It is difficult to assess whether
the rise of digital multimodality has aided or injured the processes of
knowledge dissemination through recontextualization. The message here seems to
be that the expert has been aided by the digital platform, but that rising to
this rostrum is not done without peril. Bondi et al posit a “third space”
between the expert and the lay audience wherein the media is active (2). This
space has not been eroded, and Hunston’s, Duguid’s, and Camiciottoli’s
chapters reveal where these traditional structures are best capitalized upon.
However, as Puschmann and Engberg and Maier argue, a new genre is being
created, one which necessitates a new professional literacy, as does all
technological advancement. This realization is important for researchers going
forward as mastery of this growing genre will allow for communication in a
variety of venues previously inaccessible to scholarly discourse—however a
shift in presentation method is essential. A full-fledged understanding of how
the lay audience disseminates its own information will direct these shifts.
The inclusion of the final chapters which provide new methodology for this
process and massive data resources for further study are invaluable for the
new researcher hoping to build multimodal literacy or for the seasoned
researcher hoping to recontexualize their work to new venues, either in
response to or for prevention of content collapse. 

This volume and its parent conference expertly engage a topic from a
linguistic perspective which reaches beyond the bounds of our field, making
the work catalogued here valuable to a variety of disciplines and professions.
 This furthers the perception of our discipline as a science—it
recontextualizes our internal discourse in a way which highlights its
inherent, external value. The essays in this volume also present an example of
the diverse, yet cooperative nature of linguistics by showcasing complex
syntactic data next to qualitative data bookended by theory. The resulting
material is not discordant or disingenuous, and its organic nature is
bolstered by the fact that these thoughts grew out of a supporting academic
community’s event. I recommend this volume not only to any linguist, but also
to anyone studying marketing, interpersonal communication, cognitive science,
social networks (or social networking), genre studies, or broadcasting. One
area to note is that this volume is English translated from Italian;
therefore, a small number of essays herein read a bit stilted and may be best
approached in their original preparation.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Kelly Wright is a graduate student and instructor at the University of
Kentucky. She is currently researching racial discrimination from various
standpoints, utilizing sociophonetic and corpus methodologies. Her previous
work address language planning efforts related to pan-African nationalism and
current applications of language policy.





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