Abstract
Flowerdew is a prolific and readable researcher as well as a supporter of others in the field. This volume’s 15 contributions are native and non-native speakers of English based in Asia, Australia, Britain, Europe and the United States, all analysing English-language data. This review takes a thematic approach. Following comments on the editor’s introductory chapter, it compares and contrasts the contexts, methods and findings of the studies.
Flowerdew’s 25-page opening chapter could act as an introductory lecture for a discourse analysis course. His view is that ‘there is no particular model’ (p. 4) accepted universally, but rather that the goals and context of each study determine the type of analysis. The book’s range of models supports this point. The 10-point template he supplied to the book’s contributors explains the uniformity of layout in the chapters.
We turn first to the authors’ contexts. These are varied, ranging from professional discourse in an international bridge design meeting (Handford) to healthcare communication (Iedema and Carroll). Cotterill draws on a quite specific context, ‘the construction of witness examination in British criminal trial talk’ (p. 71), which she describes as ‘one of the most archetypal power-asymmetric institutional contexts’ (p. 71). Before showing us the data, she discusses contextual matters, including typical talk types during trials by jury. The eight-level hierarchy of rights to interact shows the judge first, with interpreters ranking only one above the lowest group, jurors.
Not surprisingly, given the researchers’ own professional worlds, three chapters look at educational discourse: academic contexts (Mauranen), primary and secondary schooling (Rose and Martin) and second-language classrooms (Waring). Although too late to be included in this book, Philp et al.’s (2014) work in this last area is a good source for those wanting to know more. Business language appears in two chapters, one in relation to the ‘construction of an attractive workplace culture on the Internet’ (Gunnarsson, p. 91) and the other on news events (O’Halloran et al.). Bednarek looks at ‘Wh-questions and communicative context in television dialogue’ (p. 49), Wodak focuses on political discourse and Baker’s case study is about context itself, titled ‘Considering context when analysing representations of gender and sexuality’. He examines responses to one Daily Mail article which received the highest ever number of complaints to the Press Complaints Commission.
Future researchers looking for starting points could consider the varied and complex range of methods used in this volume. Baker’s case study approach is influenced by feminist post-structuralist discourse analysis with its emphasis on researcher reflexivity. To that end, he discusses this specific context, including three elements: how that newspaper ‘has written about related topics in the past’ (p. 29), the (British) society where the article was published and also the researcher himself, whose starting point is explained towards the end.
Gunnarsson’s approach is theoretical, combining sociolinguistics, sociology and organisational theory with text linguistics and narratology. She organised data from the websites of such companies as McDonalds and Nokia into three-dimensional images to illustrate the companies’ environmental and societal contexts. Her summary of findings adds to existing work on business discourse including her own extensive work, which fills about a quarter of the reference list in her chapter.
Bednarek’s study of the frequency, distribution, extent, combinations and functions of questions used corpora and computer software to examine 26 different TV series, including comedies, dramas, crime, adventure, romance and sci-fi. Her final list of ‘multiple avenues for future research’ (p. 66) could tempt researchers who do not mind sitting through huge numbers of programmes.
Harris and Rampton use linguistic ethnography, although, as they explain, there are choices depending on whether the interest is social, institutional or relating to conversation. Hart’s cognitive linguistic approach examines the same events reported in six different newspapers. Reflexive videotaping led to two lengthy case studies of communication in the healthcare sector (Iedema and Carroll). Lou approaches context geosemiotically, a term only just over a decade old. A brief definition doesn’t do it justice but, briefly, it not only ‘acknowledges the importance of place but also returns space to context’ (p. 207). O’Halloran et al. use a multimodal approach, starting with references to the work of Halliday and Hasan (1985) 30 years ago but with the advantage of the ‘specialist multimodal analysis software’ (p. 248) now available.
Findings by discourse analysts are sometimes of more interest to the researcher than to the subjects, but the healthcare communication study has applications for the participants in each case. This leads to the question of what use is made of discourse analysts’ findings by those studied when they have to make future decisions.
There is no need to wonder whether the participants in Mauranen’s study will be interested in its results, since they themselves are academics. We see fascinating insights into the language people use and ask for when seeking to make themselves clear in ELF (English as a lingua franca) discussions. Among other findings, ‘the most notable discourse strategy is enhanced explicitness’ (p. 241).
This book will interest researchers and the students they guide into future research topics. One unmentioned application of the results of the studies could be for ESP (English for specific purposes) teachers preparing specialist groups of professionals. Also, as suggested earlier, some findings deserve to be rewritten in more popular language in order to be read by the people whose language came under the microscope.