Issues of genre demarcation

54 texts, talking to other non-native speakers, composing e-mail messages, supplying explanations and instructions, as well as for oral and written translation.

55 points: text and context. Since such an approach seems to offer a sufficient degree of perspicacity regarding textual, contextual, goal-related, subject-dependent, institutional and discourse community-based variables, it promises to function adequately in determining and reinterpreting the genre membership of spoken academic events.

Applying genre-based categories when it comes to spoken academic discourse seems to become particularly problematic for, as it has repeatedly been indicated in the present section of this dissertation, unlike written academic discourse, academic oracy appears to have been relegated to a somewhat neglected position in discourse analysis. This relative inattention is especially acutely felt in the case of academic lectures and talks, in contrast with academic prose (cf. Csomay, 2000, pp. 30-31). In line with Biber (1988, 1995), Csomay (2000) postulates an oral-literate continuum, with academic lectures, seen as representing somewhat hybrid register, occupying an intermediate position on it.

(p. 32). When further expounding on the properties that link academic lectures to either end of the scale, Csomay points out that academic lectures are similar to academic prose both are meant to supply a vast amount of information in an abstract and explicit way, both evolve out of planned discourse and both rely on written prose as an antecedent.

Furthermore, besides their marked focus on providing information, academic lectures and academic prose are both marked by low interactivity. (p. 33). At the same time, however, academic lectures are also closely affiliated with naturally occurring face-to-face conversations in the sense that, albeit to varying degrees, but both share interaction as an inherent feature, and as a corollary, they take place in real time (i.e. participants are found in the same temporal and spatial setting). Motivated by such comparative insights, Csomay employs a corpus-based research design to explore the academic lecture as register incorporating characteristics of both academic prose and natural conversation. Consistent with the discourse features presumed to show resemblance to

56

Dimension Feature group Associated linguistic

features 1 Informational focus - "with communicative

situations that require a high informational focus and provide ample opportunity for careful integration of information and precise lexical choice" (Biber, 1988, p.

104).

noun preposition

attributive adjective passive

2 Involved production - "fragmented, generalized packaging of content with an affective, interpersonal focus" and "on-line production circumstances" (Biber, 1995, p.145).

present tense private verbs that -deletions contractions

first person pronouns second person pronouns

‘be’ as copula 3 Explicit discourse (elaborated reference) -

"referentially explicit discourse" (Biber 1995, p. 156).

wh relative object position wh relative subject position phrasal co-ordination 4 Abstract style - "especially prominent in the

academic sub-register of technical and engineering prose …all spoken registers are marked by the absence of this" (Biber, 1995, p. 165).

agentless-passive by-passive

post-nominal past participial 5 On-line informational elaboration - "used

in spoken, on-line registers … provide informational elaboration while explicitly presenting the speaker’s stance or attitudes towards the proposition" (Biber, 1995, p.

167).

that verb complement that adjective complement demonstrative pronouns existential 'there'

Table 3: Functional categories in academic lectures examined by Csomay (2000) and the associated linguistic features, based on Csomay (2000).

57 either of the two aforementioned extremes of the literate-oral continuum, Csomay centres her investigation around parameters like information focus, involved production, explicit-elaborated reference, abstract style and on-line informational elaboration (pp.

33-34). (For more detailed definitions of each feature group and their linguistic exponents, see Table 3: Functional categories in academic lectures examined by Csomay (2000) and the associated linguistic features, based on Csomay (2000).)

Another scholarly undertaking that makes an attempt at adapting the research methodological yields of Biber’s (1988) multi-dimensional model to the context of analysing samples from conversation, speech and academic prose also commands attention. Xiao and McEnery (2005), in an effort to compare the usability of the multi-dimensional analysis and Tribble’s (1999) adoption of Scott’s (1999) keyword function analysis, arrive at the conclusion that findings afforded by the two designs show close similarities (p. 76), although there are some dissimilarities as well. One of them, between conversation and speech, is to be sought in dimension 1, i.e. informational vs.

involved production. Another point of salient of difference between these two genres is observed in connection with dimension 6, i.e. online elaboration. The bottom-line of these juxtapositions between conversation and speech, ultimately set against the third genre, academic prose, is worded by Xiao and McEnery in the following terms:

[…] conversation is considerably more interactive and affective than speech.

While speech is informationally dense, it is subject to real-time production conditions, and thus speech needs online informational elaboration. The two spoken genres differ significantly from academic prose along dimensions 1, 3, and 5. This means that on one hand, academic prose is the most “literate,” technical, and abstract of the three genres under consideration; on the other hand, it tends to make explicit in-text reference, whereas the two spoken genres make context-dependent references (pp 76-77).

58 Tackling the problem of clarifying the genre-specific properties of academic talk in American university classrooms, Csomay (2006) uses a corpus-based method to analyse nearly 200 university class sessions across the US. Drawing on the analytical framework constructed by Biber (1988), she carries out a multi-dimensional register analysis by juxtaposing the situational and linguistic features of university classroom, on the one hand, and academic prose and face-to-face conversation, on the other hand (p. 119). Csomay's research suggests that academic talk is more akin to face-to-face conversation in terms of most situational features than to academic prose (p. 131). This finding seems to provide further evidence of the tendency of academic speech events to become increasingly informal (cf. Ferris and Tagg (1996); Ferris (1998)).

Although electing to place her empirical focus on a very specific genre of oral academic discourse, namely Honoris Causa acceptance speeches, Fortanet (2005) spurred by the comparatively meagre attention devoted to spoken academic discourse as opposed written academic discourse, a generally observed condition alluded to throughout this present dissertation, advocates a systematic and principled treatment of the genres of academic oracy (p. 31). She quotes the main arguments against setting aside equally elaborate and extensive genre-based taxonomies of oral academic discourse, mainly constructed by Swales (1990) and Gimenez (2000), representing as a stance which views spoken academic genres as dependent on written ones, usually documents prepared in advance and adjusted to a spoken discourse setting. Amongst the oral genres she lists in this respects, one can find conference presentations, which is conventionally perceived as the oral projection of research papers. Accentuating the fact that in the academic context, in a number of instances, discourses representing oral and written genres may often share the same audience, Fortanet adopts Gimenez’s (2000) categorisation of spoken academic genres:

59 a. expository genres: lecture, paper presentation, poster presentation, etc.;

b. interactive genres: the interview, the speech, the workshop, the negotiation, the academic meeting, etc.;

c. teaching genres: the tutorial, the seminar, and the academic lecture (p. 32).

Fortanet, however, hastens to voice her reservations about the solidity of such a classification, arguing that it fails to clearly spell out the relation between the speaker and the audience and the actual function of the given utterance. Therefore, she proposes a model which, among other refinements, subsumes tutorials and seminars under the heading ‘interactive genres’ and assigns an expository role to academic lectures (see Figure 4: Categorisation of academic genres according to purpose (based on Fortanet, 2005)). In her classification, Fortanet seems to relegate interaction between speaker and audience to a secondary position and chooses to predicate her model on the purposes of academic genres. At the same time, especially with regard to the research focus of the present dissertation, it is well worth observing that Fortanet separates academic oral presentations into two distinct categories: one type represents students’ presentations that take place in a classroom environment, whereas the other applies to oral presentations delivered at conferences and is therefore dealt with in a single category with other spoken genres that derive from empirical research and occur in conference settings. Furthermore, this construct-related decision of the author, who is primarily interested in describing one particular genre of institutional academic discourse, i.e.

Honoris Cause speeches, suggests that academic spoken genres cannot be treated in isolation, even when the focus is on a single genre in a given study, but their generic specificities and relationships with other genres also ought to be addressed. A similar scholarly attitude is intended to be adopted by the author of the present dissertation, in full cognisance of the perils of becoming deeply engrossed in grasping the details of a

60 single genre and, thus, failing to recognise the wider implications it may offer for understanding for academic praxis in more general terms.

Figure 4: Categorisation of academic genres according to purpose (based on Fortanet, 2005, p. 35).

This systemic interpretation of genre, taking full account of not-only text-internal but text-external factors as well is the major theme of Bhatia’s (2010) article. In his discussion, Bhatia foregrounds the notion ‘interdiscursivity’ as opposed to

‘intertextuality’ and asserts that the former is ‘a function of appropriation of generic resources across discursive, professional and cultural practices, which, it is claimed, is central to our understanding of the complexities of genres that are typically employed in

spoken academic discourse

CLASSROOM GENRES – lecture – seminar – tutorial interview – students’

presentations – oral exams

INSTITUTIONAL GENRES

– academic year opening lectures

– commencement addresses

– Honoris Causa speeches

– prize acceptance speeches

– Presidents’ or Rectors’

addresses to the faculty – memorial services for recently departed professors

RESEARCH GENRES

CONFERENCE GENRES – plenary lecture – paper

presentation – poster presentation – workshop – research meeting

OTHER RESEARCH GENRES – PhD thesis defences – Master’s thesis

presentations – Research projects

61 professional, disciplinary, and institutional communication’ (p. 32). Drawing on an earlier work of his (Bhatia, 2004), the author describes a three-space multi-perspective framework for the analysis of written discourse comprising textual, socio-pragmatic and general social layers, which he shows to be particularly fitting for interpreting professional discourse. Carrying this model further, Bhatia proposes a slightly modified framework containing four levels, namely ‘textual’, ‘genre-specific’, ‘professional practice’ and ‘professional culture’ (p. 33). He accounts for the validity of this representation of professional discourse by pointing out that the text, as the final outcome of a series of compositional processes, may be seen as a result of an amalgamation of these processes, thereby making analyses at the four specified levels possible contemporaneously. In addition to emphasising these aspects of his model, Bhatia also directs attention to two relationships which he deems to be vital in professional discourse from an analytical point of view. In this vein, he identifies, on the one hand, a text-context relationship, and a discursive practice and professional practice relationship, on the other. He argues that these two relations are chiefly dependent on

‘text-internal and text-external semiotic resources and constraints’ (p. 34). To demonstrate the versatility of the applications of a model predicated on interdiscursivity, Bhatia also endeavours to establish a series of links between discursive practices and professional practices. To give his discussion an overall theoretical angle, the author issues straightforward claims about the centrality of interdiscursivity in genre analysis, underscoring the tension-laden relationship between generic integrity and the appropriation of generic resources. All these theoretical underpinnings delineate an orientation which is best labelled as critical genre analysis, an approach that Bhatia appears to embrace wholeheartedly for a better understanding of the phenomena and processes of professional discourse.

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