32.2843, Review: Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Sociolinguistics: Kong (2019)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-32-2843. Tue Sep 07 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.2843, Review: Applied Linguistics; Discourse Analysis; Sociolinguistics: Kong (2019)

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Date: Tue, 07 Sep 2021 20:54:12
From: Md Mijanur Rahman [mrahma25 at calstatela.edu]
Subject: Professional Discourse

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36721617


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-3455.html

AUTHOR: Kenneth  Kong
TITLE: Professional Discourse
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2019

REVIEWER: Md Mijanur Rahman, California State University, Los Angeles, USA

SUMMARY

The book, “Professional Discourse” by Kenneth Kong (2019), is an advanced
scholarly applied linguistics text for those interested in analyzing
discourse, especially written ones, in professional settings. In 10 chapters,
the book not only provides a theory-rich description of what various
professional discourse analysis frameworks could look like but also
incorporates these frameworks in actual analysis of written professional
discourse. Structurally speaking, on top of an introduction (Chapter 1), the
book’s remaining 9 chapters are organized into three distinct parts: Part 1 –
“Conceptual issues” (Chapter 2), Part II – “Linguistic realizations” (Chapters
3-5), and Part III – “Functions and global patterns” (Chapters 6-10). 

Chapter 1, “Introduction”, theorizes the concept of professional discourse as
a set of variable communication (mainly writing) practices across domains,
seeing them as a historical construct, a tool for socializing into different
(often overlapping) professional communities, and an instrument for performing
ones’ professional selves. A big chunk of the chapter is devoted to
identifying seven key characteristics shared by all professional discourses:
reflection of some professional training, complex negotiation of social
relationships, use of “logical-semantic devices” (p. 15), articulation of
complex goals/purposes, intertextuality and interdiscursivity, a predictable
pattern, and multimodality. The chapter also addresses the factors responsible
for variation in professional discourse, which range from specific
professional domains and their unique histories, complex goals, impacts of the
communication channel (whether speech or writing), to cultural factors like
institutional affiliation, gender identity, and ethnic backgrounds. The
chapter ends with an articulation of the book’s intended audience and the
chapter organization.   

Chapter 2, entitled “Profession as a symbolic community: the different
dimensions of professional discourse”, constitutes Part I of the book –
“Conceptual issues”. The chapter establishes the book’s conceptual basis
through a review of the relevant literature (e.g., Swales, 1990; Wenger, 1998)
to propose an alternative model for conceptualizing a professional community.
The review mainly problematizes John Swales’s view of a discourse community
(1990), for example, by arguing for a replacement of Swales’s implicit ideals
of a unified community with a notion of professional struggles for hegemony,
also substituting Swales’s notion of a “broadly agreed upon public goals”
(1990, p. 24) with shared functions to represent the social and variable
nature of what people do in a professional community. Seeing language as a
means towards an end rather than an end in itself, the chapter further
proposes a sociocultural view of professional communities by highlighting its
activities (“motives, actions, conditions and means”) rather than language
conventions (p. 46), while also adding knowledge as a key criterion in such a
description. The chapter also encapsulates the entire theoretical discussion
by defining a symbolic community as “a meaningful group or social network with
shared membership, knowledge, ideology, values, interpersonal positions,
activities and resources” that are mediated by symbolic resources like
language (p. 49). In the end, the chapter provides a four-dimensional
checklist of questions: ideological, social, cognitive, and logistic, in order
to help researchers analyze a profession’s contextual and socially-situated
nature.

Part II – “Linguistic realizations” contains three chapters (Chapters 3, 4,
and 5), each focusing, in a unique way, on how local level lexico-grammatical
choices can be shown to represent a professional’s ideologies and identities. 

For example, Chapter 3, entitled “Ideology in professional discourse”, defines
ideology in its non-pejorative sense as a profession’s unique beliefs and
concepts with three overlapping dimensions: cognitive, social, and
representational. The chapter argues for locating these ideological issues in
the sentence-level lexical choices of a profession’s representative genres of
writing by using a systemic functional linguistic approach to discourse
analysis. The author also examines three main devices of professional
discourse: 1. participants (representation of human and non-human discourse
subjects using strategies like (im)personalization, inclusion and exclusion,
passivization, and nominalization), 2. circumstantial adjuncts (adverbials
expressing notions like time, place, manner, and condition), and 3. process
analysis (a semantic analysis of action, mental, relational, and verbal
processes). The discussion also involves a focused case study for each
category: legal and medical case reports for participants, legal ordinances in
the U.S. and China for circumstantial adjuncts, and two fund commentaries for
process analysis, all showing a profession’s realization of its ideology in
their lexical and syntactic preferences. 

Chapter 4, entitled “Communicative competence in the professional workplace:
an identity-based perspective”, builds on the applied linguistics tradition on
a second language learner’s communicative competence in the target language to
come up with a theory of communicative practices in professional settings,
which highlights the strategic nature of communicative competence and the
dominant role played by the professionals’ identities. Focusing on identity’s
constructed and performative natures mediated by language, the author
foregrounds two aspects of professional identities: identity roles and
identity virtues, in which the roles refer to the relatively stable aspects of
a professional’s multiple selves whereas the identity virtues represent an
individual’s more dynamic and negotiable positionalities in workplace
settings. The chapter also illustrates the analytical categories by focusing
on the multiple roles of a single legal professional through an analysis of a
lawyer’s letters of advice. The analysis looks at the local level linguistic
realizations, like those of lexico-grammatical choices, as a device to
construct the lawyer’s roles as representing an institution, advising with
expert knowledge, advocating for a client, and interpreting the relevant laws
for a specific setting.

Chapter 5, entitled “A model of interpersonal negotiation in professional
discourse”, continues the discussion of identity virtues started in Chapter 4
to show how people construct their professional identities and how discourse
analysts can locate these practices linguistically. The major part of the
chapter reviews, problematizes, and proposes revisions to the literature on
language functions (e.g., by saying that the interactional function is
inextricable from the transactional function), on (im)politeness (starting
from Brown and Levinson’s strategic politeness theories to Culpeper’s notions
of impoliteness), on stances and their relationship to professional
socializations, and on the complexity of linguistic indexicality. The chapter
ends with an analysis of academic confrontational discourse in a chain of
three journal articles in applied linguistics to illustrate the performance of
professional identity virtues in local level linguistic realizations.      

Part III, entitled “Functions and global patterns”, comprises five chapters
(Chapters 6-10) and brings up analytical issues that often go beyond the
immediate text. 

The author utilizes Chapter 6, entitled “Speech functions”, to relate two key
pragmatic theories (i.e., speech acts and the cooperative principle) to show
how professional discourse has been and can be analyzed. Distinguishing
pragmatics from semantics through the pragmaticists’ focus on the meanings of
utterances influenced by contextual factors, the chapter first reviews the
theories of speech acts, both Austin’s tri-partite description of utterances
as locution, illocution, and perlocution (1975) and Searle’s classification of
speech act types in representatives, directives, commissives, expressives, and
declarations (1975). Then the chapter presents Grice’s cooperative principle
and its attendant four maxims of conversations: quantity, quality, relation,
and manner (1975). These theoretical descriptions are followed by an
examination of, first, some studies that analyzed the professional discourse
by using different types of speech acts as a unit of analysis along the lines
of Searle, and then some other studies based on the Gricean cooperative
principle. The chapter also addresses some of Grice’s critics, especially
those seeking to revise his theories to accommodate cross-cultural variation
in performing professional discourse and identities. 

Chapter 7, entitled “Intertextuality”, highlights the complexities of
different types of discourses: professional, institutional, and business, by
bringing to the fore the concept of intertextuality. Seeing intertextuality as
a kind of recontextualization that incorporates materials (textual elements,
discourses, and conversations) from one context into another, the chapter
identities three types of recontextualization: intratextual (occurring within
the same text), intertextual (occurring among multiple texts), and
interdiscursive (the taking over of one genre by another). The chapter offers
a model for studying different types of recontextualization through the lenses
of explicit and implicit, modalized and unmodalized assertions, and
assumptions. The chapter also illustrates the analytical concepts of
recontextualization by tracing voices of academics in performance-appraisal
discourses in universities, depersonalization and indirectness in a journal’s
notes to contributors, and the discourses of business in a university’s
promotion of an academic program. 

Chapter 8, entitled “Genre and text patterning”, first engages with and builds
on the four traditions of genre studies (i.e., The New Rhetoric School, The
English for Specific Purpose School, The Sydney School, and the
Cultural-Anthropological Tradition), with a focus on professional contexts.
The review emphasizes genres’ contextually-situated and dynamic natures and
their roles in society and culture, while also pointing out the pedagogical
applications of the move analysis in written genres. The second part of the
chapter illustrates the theoretical discussion by analyzing four distinct but
often overlapping genre categories: promotional, regulatory, negotiation, and
reporting, with case studies of professional written genres across cultures. 

Chapter 9  entitled “Multimodality”, focuses on the presence of visual
elements in written discourse, reviewing the literature on visual signs and
their varying relationships with the verbal content in a text. The author also
develops a taxonomy of linguistic functions that one could look for in
analyzing texts with visuals in it. The taxonomy further specifies and adds to
the systemic functional linguistics classification of ideational,
interpersonal, and textual functions to capture the complexity of visually
rich professional discourse. The chapter ends with an application of the
taxonomy in analyzing an image heavy travel brochure for a tourist spot in
India. 

In the book’s final chapter (i.e., Chapter 10), entitled “Conclusion”, the
author wraps up the book by outlining some real and potential changes
affecting the studies of professional discourse in recent times, which include
the overemphasis on discrete professional contexts, the need for incorporating
the practitioner’s expertise in discourse analysis projects, and the shift in
analytical focus from texts to activities. The chapter ends with
thought-provoking questions about the linguistic impacts of the changes in
professional practices, such as the emphasis on the professional “own” self,
the development of home offices, the pervasive nature of promotional language,
and the shifts in professional ideologies and technologies. 

EVALUATION

“Professional Discourse” provides an insightful description of what
professional discourse, especially in its written medium, looks like across a
variety of professional domains and how one can analyze it. 

A major strength of the book is that it exhibits how discourse analysis,
professional or not, is not a monolithic or uniform act of meaning making. It
is rather a variable practice that can take many forms, as analysts may ask a
variety of questions befitting their projects. The focus on specific
sub-topics of discourse analysis in each chapter (e.g., professional
ideologies in Chapter 3, professional identity performance in Chapters 4 and
5, linguistic functions in Chapter 6, intertextuality in Chapter 7, genre
features in Chapter 8, and multimodality in Chapter 9) covers a wide array of
perspectives from which one can analyze professional written discourse.   

Moreover, most of the chapters maintain a similarly structured progression of
ideas, starting from a review of the relevant theoretical developments in a
specific content area, problematizing some key aspects of those theories to
accommodate a more complex and sophisticated understanding of discourse, using
the theoretical discussion to develop a model analytical framework, to then
actually applying that model in written discourse analysis. This consistent
combination of theory and practice, especially the hands-on approach, as
reflected in a series of case studies in multiple chapters, makes this text
stand out. 

Interestingly, the book also poses some thought-provoking questions for future
research at the end (in Chapter 10), which relate, somewhat prophetically, to
recent developments in the professions. These questions surround the
development of home offices, an increasing emphasis on the autonomous growth
of professionals (one cannot help thinking about the dominant work-from-home
trends in recent times due to the coronavirus pandemic), and how these new
developments could affect people’s performance of their professional selves in
language. Future discourse researchers can build on these questions. 

That being said, the book is theory-heavy. There are actual analyses in most
chapters, but they involve a plethora of new terms being introduced each time,
which may make it rather inaccessible to readers who may not have had any
prior linguistic training. The reviews in each chapter are also extensive in
terms of coverage, meaning that scores of authors have been put in the mix to
develop the theoretical arguments. Each chapter presents almost all major
works done in different areas of linguistics, especially discourse analysis,
pragmatics, and genre studies. But this coverage comes at the cost of creating
an extra cognitive burden on the reader, who will have to make sense of a
large body of work and terms in such a brief space. The author, however, did
explicitly mention early on that advanced teachers and scholars are the book’s
intended audience and that anyone interested in further understanding can
follow up with the references at the end of each chapter. 

Furthermore, professional discourse can be seen as an interdisciplinary area
of studies. People from rhetoric and composition or technical and professional
writing can equally claim expertise in how professional discourse could be
conceptualized and analyzed. But the target audience for this book remains
those in the applied linguistics tradition, as the theories consulted come
overwhelmingly from the scholarship of language teaching. This orientation
becomes especially clear in Chapter 4, where professional competence is
defined in terms of communicative competence in English language teaching. 

Finally, the book can be used as a key text in any advanced course or graduate
level seminar in discourse analysis or as a special topic in applied
linguistics, especially for those interested in the English for Specific
Purpose tradition of learning about and examining professional written
discourse.

REFERENCES

Austin, John L. 1975. “How to do things with words”. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press. 

Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987. “Politeness: Some universals in
language use”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Culpeper, Jonathan. 1996. Toward an anatomy of impoliteness. “Journal of
Pragmatics” 25. 349-367.

Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry L. Morgan
(eds.), “Syntax and semantics, Volume III: Speech acts”, 41-58. New York:
Academic Press.

Searle, John R. 1975. A taxonomy of illocutionary acts. In Keith Gunderson
(ed.), “Language, mind, and knowledge”, 344-369. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.

Swales, John M. 1990. “Genre analysis: English in academic and research
settings”. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wenger, Etienne. 1998. “Communities of practice”. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr. Md Mijanur Rahman is an Assistant Professor of Writing Studies
(Multilingualism/Translingualism) in the Department of English at California
State University, Los Angeles. He completed his Ph.D. in English Studies at
Illinois State University. A teacher-scholar, he brings in interdisciplinary
expertise in Applied Linguistics and Writing Studies, teaching courses in both
these areas. His research primarily addresses the issues of language
differences in writing classrooms and the social justice implications of
language diversity in the workplace, the school system, and the public life.
He also holds Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in English from the University
of Rajshahi.





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