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  • Discourse in the professions: Perspectives from corpus linguistics ed. by Ulla Connor and Thomas A. Upton
  • Charlotte Brammer
Discourse in the professions: Perspectives from corpus linguistics. Ed. by Ulla Connor and Thomas A. Upton. (Studies in corpus linguistics 16.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. 330. ISBN 1588115739. $119 (Hb).

In Discourse in the professions, Ulla Connor and Thomas A. Upton have collected articles to support the use of specialized corpora to expand current knowledge of academic and professional language. In ‘The argument for using English specialized corpora to understand academic and professional language’, Lynne Flowerdew defines the term ‘specialized corpora’ and discusses how this term has been interpreted in various corpora collected for academic and professional purposes. Following a broad overview of the field, Flowerdew provides suggested guidelines for future building of specialized corpora. The article makes up all of Section 1 in the text. The three subsequent sections contain three (Section 2) and four (Sections 3 and 4) articles each and move from the question of WHY specialized corpora are useful to HOW they are useful.

The articles in Section 2 demonstrate how corpus linguistics can be used in academic settings. Rita C. Simpson uses the MICASE spoken language corpus to identify formulaic expressions common in academic discussions and suggests that these expressions used often by professors may represent ‘part of the learning curve for the development of an academic speaking style’ (60). Randi Reppen uses the TOEFL 2000 Spoken and Written Academic Language corpus to illustrate how corpus linguistics can identify some complexities of academic registers, including technical vocabulary and complex sentence structures. Ken Hyland, in ‘Corpus analysis and academic persuasion’, uses a corpus of 240 academic journal articles to show how formulaic rhetorical constructions make such articles persuasive for other academicians.

The articles in Section 3 shift the focus to professional discourse communities. Martin Warren relates design criteria for the creation of the business subcorpus of the Hong Kong Corpus of Spoken English. In the following article, Winne Cheng uses the same corpus within the context of the hotel industry to suggest that ESL teachers should address intonation, move structure, and pragmatics. Michael McCarthy and Michael Handford assert that Spoken Business English is not ‘just general English with specialist nomenclature’ (187), based on analysis using the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Business English. Vijay K. Bhatia, Nicola M. Langton, and Jane Lung assess the ramifications of using corpus linguistics to analyze legal discourses.

The last section focuses on how corpus linguistics can be useful in exploring interdisciplinary language use. Each article uses the Indiana Center for Intercultural Communication corpus. Connor and Upton generate detailed descriptions of written grant proposals as a genre. In the second article, Connor and Kostya Gladkov find that rational appeals are most common among fundraising letters, and in the third article, Elizabeth Goering finds that metaphors of friendship and partnership are frequently used in fundraising letters. Continuing the focus on such letters, Avon Crismore uses a metatext approach in order to analyze the use of pronouns as rhetorical devices.

Charlotte Brammer
Samford University
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