The demands of today’s society for greater specialization have brought about a profound transformation in the humanities, which are not immune to the competitive pressure to meet new challenges that are present in other sectors. Thus, lecturers and researchers in modern languages and applied linguistics departments have made great efforts to design syllabi and materials more attuned to the competences and requirements of potential working environments. At the same time, linguists have attempted to apply their expertise in wider areas, creating research institutes that focus on applying language and linguistics in different contexts and offering linguistic services to society as a whole. This book attempts to provide a global view of the multiple voices involved in interdisciplinary research and innovative proposals in teaching specialized languages while offering contributions that attempt to fill the demands of a varied scope of disciplines such as the sciences, professions, or educational settings. The chapters in this book are made up of current research on these themes: discourse analysis in academic and professional genres, specialized translation, lexicology and terminology, and ICT research and teaching of specialized languages.

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/.

Stance and Voice in Written Academic Genres brings together a range of perspectives on two of the most important and contested concepts in applied linguistics: stance and voice. International experts provide an accessible, yet authoritative introduction to key issues and debates surrounding these terms.

Using a wide range of examples, this book examines the discourse of professional writing and its important role in society.

The author describes this volume as a "textography" because it combines certain elements of both text analysis and ethnography. Through analysis of texts, textual forms, and systems of texts, it shows the lives, life commitments, and life projects of people deeply embedded in the literate culture of the university. The people examined work in a single building, but their textual lives are maintained in different times and spaces, measured by the dimensions of text production and text circulation in their fields of work. These domains of text time and space are to some degree differentiated by the three specialties that mark the three floors of a small building at a major research university--the ethnographic site of this journey into textual lives--computing, taxonomic botany, and English as a second language. This research site provides the opportunity to re-examine the concept of discourse community and to investigate the nature and origination of academic discourse from a new perspective. The author is a distinctive member of the applied linguistics and composition communities, an original stamped by the global village of language education in which he has lived his life, and revealed in his own autobiographical account embedded within this book. This book now reveals him as a person making text about how people are embedded in making their textual lives within the discursive landscapes their communities afford. In doing so, he shows not only his own love of language as a way of life, but also his appreciation of how all his subjects find their labors of love in the language they create. This book has been written to appeal to a general academic audience as well as to specialists in rhetoric, discourse analysis, and composition.

Engagement has turned essential in today’s communication, as professional communities are becoming more specialised and transient, and their audiences more diverse. Promotionalism and competitiveness, in addition, increasingly pervade human activity, and thus engaging readers, listeners and viewers to attract and persuade them is part of the know-how of almost every profession. The eighteen chapters in this book, written by well-known discourse analysts from different nationalities and research backgrounds, and with various interests and understandings of communicative engagement, guide us through a discovery of perspectives and strategies across work settings and practices, genres, semiotic modes, discourses, disciplines, and theoretical frameworks and methods. They build a mosaic that leads to a broad picture of (meta)discursive engagement as (di)stance and raises current issues, challenges, and future research directions.

Dialogicity in Written Specialised Genres analyses how human beings intentionally establish a network of relations that contribute to the construction of discourse in different genres in academic, promotional and professional domains in English, Spanish and Italian. The chapters in the present volume investigate individual voices, both those assumed by the writer and those attributed to others, and how they act interpersonally and become explicit in the discourse. From a number of different research approaches, contributing authors focus on various textual components: self-mention, impersonation, attribution markers, engagement markers, attitude markers, boosters, hedges, reporting verbs, politeness strategies and citations. The collection is unusual in that it addresses these issues not only from the perspective of English, but also from that of Spanish and Italian. It thus represents a refreshing reassessment of the contrastive dimension in the study of voice and dialogic relations, taking into consideration language, specialised fields and genre. The volume will appeal to researchers interested in language as multidimensional dialogue, particularly with regard to different written specialised texts from different linguistic backgrounds. Novice writers may also find it of help in order to attain a greater understanding of the dialogic nature of writing.

This volume brings together contributions focused on, and shaped by, two areas of linguistic research: genre analysis and the interpersonal component of language and discourse. It explores the interplay and interaction of genre and the interpersonal component, revealing potential connections and interdependencies between genre conventions and the realisation of interpersonal meanings, viewed from the perspective of the systemic functional approach to language and discourse analysis. The contributions focus on a variety of aspects of the interpersonal in selected genres of professional discourse, including not only communication among professionals, but also genres produced by professionals to address non-specialists. The volume consists of nine chapters grouped into three sections, guiding readers through four major discourse domains, namely media discourse, academic discourse, institutional discourse, and promotional discourse. Institutional and promotional discourses are combined in a single section, reflecting the hybridism of the majority of the genres under investigation here: genres of institutional discourse typically exhibit features akin to advertising, not only presenting the institutions in terms of the scope of their activities and services, but also serving a clear promotional purpose. The studies document how omnipresent, varied and plentiful the strategies of intersubjective positioning are, and how significant their position in genres and discourses invariably is. The social and cultural grounding of genres requires them to be conventional, yet it also ensures their flexibility, continuous development and change—qualities which make genres a permanent challenge and inspiration for research and discussion.

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.

“John Swales’ textography might also be called ‘comparative rhetoric in a small building,’ offering proof, once again, that another culture may be only a trip up or down a flight of stairs. . . .such an appealing and original book.” ---BAAL News Originally published in 1998, Other Floors, Other Voices uses texts to capture the lives of three communities operating within a single building (the North University Building, or NUBS) on the University of Michigan campus. Swales' thoughtful exploration of the three units—the Computer Resource Site, the University Herbarium (botany), and the English Language Institute—centers around the individuals who work on each floor and the discourse-related activities they engage in. The Twentieth Anniversary Edition of Other Floors, Other Voices includes: a new preface, an introductory essay on the value of rereading this volume many years after publication, and an epilogue that reflects on and reveals what has happened to the three units in the past 20 years.