Disciplinary Discourses : Social Interactions in Academic Writing

228 Pages·2007·16.42 MB·English

by  Ken Hyland

Disciplinary Discourses

Disciplinary Discourses
Social Interactions
in Academic Writing
Ken Hyland
University of London
MICHIGAN CLASSICS EDITION
The University of Michigan Press
Ann Arbor
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Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2004
First published by Pearson Education Limited, Longman, 2000
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise,
without the written permission of the publisher.
ISBN 0-472-03024-8
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication
Hyland, Ken.
Disciplinary discources: social interactions in academic writing / Ken Hyland
Michigan classics ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-472-03024-8 (pbk.)
1. Authorship--Social aspects. 2. English language-Discourse analysis.
3. Scholarly publishing-Social aspects. 4. Academic writing-Study
and teaching. 5. Academic writing-Social aspects. 1. Title.
PN146.H94 2004
302.2'244-dc22 2004047984
ISBN-13 978-0-472-03024-8 (paper)
ISBN-13 978-0-472-02982-2 (electronic)
Foreword
As I write this short foreword on a chilly November weekend in Ann Arbor,
I reflect briefly on some of the events of the previous week. On Monday eve
ning, I taught my 'Writing for Publication' class; in that class, I spent some
time going over with my international doctoral students Ken Hyland's chart
showing how reporting verbs change from field to field. Engineers report, but
philosophers arf5LU!! On Tuesday afternoon, I met with some of the first-year
undergraduates taking my freshman seminar on 'Academic Discourse', three
of whom are writing their final projects on textbooks. Omar is examining
how textbook writers from three fields 'engage with their readers'; Jee-Hon
is comparing a psychology textbook published in 1971 with one published
in 2001; and Alex is analysing the forms and functions of exemplification in
the opening chapters of textbooks from physics and chemistry. All three have
been reading Chapter 6 of Disciplinary Discourses, along with other papers
about textbook discourse written by Alison Love and Greg Myers.
On Thursday, Christine Feak and I gave a workshop organized by the
University of Michigan's Graduate School on 'Writing the Literature Review'
to 80 or so students from across the university. Throughout, the discussions
and illustrations involved felt such a sense of disciplinary differences in style
and rhetoric that I am sure Ken Hyland would have approved. Finally, on
Friday Chris and I went to the university's Sweetland Writing Center to give
a seminar for graduate student instructors destined to teach disciplinary
specific writing courses in the winter semester. Our main chosen text was a
one-page introduction written by a Chinese doctoral student from the School
of Natural Resources and the Environment. This text led to sharply different
views, with those from the humanities attacking what they considered to be
its heavy use of bland parenthetical references, while the graduate students
from biology and psychology came to the text's defense.
These little stories from a particularly busy week point, I believe, to two
conclusions. First, for all of us involved in teaching academic writing
whether to undergraduates, graduates or researchers, and irrespective of the
first languages of those individuals-the issues around the linguistic and rhe-
vi Foreword
torical expression of disciplinary conventions and expectations are becoming
more and more central. Second, we have come increasingly to realise how
important in this regard have been Ken Hyland's publications over the last
decade or so. The capstone of these is his Disciplinary Discourses, which was
originally published in 2000. It is a capstone book for several reasons: its
complex methodology (corpus linguistics, move analysis, interview tran
scripts from disciplinary informants, and text-based responses from experts),
it~ coverage of a wide range of genres, its fluent writing style, and its careful
and subtle articulation of a social constructionist approach.
There was a real chance that this important volume would have gone out
of print much before its time, and so I salute the University of Michigan Press
for seizing an opportunity to republish it and, by doing so, making it easily
available to present and future practitioners and researchers in our field. For
it is indeed an important volume; the last time I looked at the Social Science
Citation Index, there had already been 38 references to Disciplinary Discourses
in the less than three years since its original publication.
John M. Swales
Ann Arbor, 2003
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgemen ts xv
1. Disciplinary cultures, texts and interactions 1
The importance of academic writing 2
The social creation of knowledge 5
Disciplinary cultures 8
Texts as social interaction 12
Approaches to academic interactions 14
2. Academic attribution: interaction through citation 20
Citation and intertextuality: some preliminaries 20
Citation signals 22
An overview of academic citation 24
Hard v soft knowledge and community practices 29
Contextualisation and the construction of knowledge 30
Agency and epistemology in citations 33
Ownership and membership in disciplinarity 34
Ethos and evaluation: the use of reporting verbs 37
Conclusions 40
3. Praise and criticism: interactions in book reviews 41
The book review genre 42
Evaluation in reviews 44
Dimensions of praise and criticism 46
Disciplinary differences in evaluations 49
Structural patterns of praise and criticism 52
Mitigation of evaluative acts 55
Conclusions 61
viii Contents
4. Speaking as an insider: promotion and credibility in abstracts 63
About abstracts 64
Texts, informants and methods 66
A move-structure classification of abstracts 67
Move-structure and rhetorical persuasion 68
Disciplinary differences in abstract structures 70
Claiming significance in abstracts 75
Claiming insider credibility 78
Evolving patterns: 1980-1997 81
5. Priority and prudence: the scientific letter 85
The letter genre 85
What are hedges and boosters? 87
Forms and frequencies of hedges and boosters 90
Circumspection and uncertainty: hedging in knowledge-making 91
Priority and solidarity: boosters in significance negotiation 97
Putting it together: hedges and boosters in letters 101
6. Constructing an expert identity: interactions in textbooks 104
The textbook genre 104
Audience and metadiscourse 109
A model of metadiscourse llO
An overview of textbook metadiscourse 113
Making connections: patterns of textual interactions 116
Constructing a writer persona: interpersonal metadiscourse 122
Negotiating expert status: some teaching and learning issues 129
7. Researching and teaching academic writing 132
A social approach to researching texts 132
A methodology for studying academic texts 136
Sources and analysis of data 138
Disciplines, texts and teaching 144
Moving on: some directions for research 150
8. Power, authority and discourse change 155
Analysing discourse and power 155
The ideological power of academic discourses 159
The economic power of academic discourses 164
The authority of discourses in disciplinary practices 167
Writer variations, social shifts and discourse change 172
Endwords 176
Appendix 1: Corpora 179
Appendix 2: Items expressing doubt and certainty investigated 188
Appendix 3: Metadiscourse items investigated 190
References 194
Subject Index 208
Author Index 210
Preface
This book makes a new appearance in the colours of the University of
Michigan Press following a relatively short, but agreeably visible, life in Chris
Candlin's Applied Linguistics and Language Studies series with Longman.
While this is not a new edition of Disciplinary Discourses, its republication in
a new imprint is a result of the mysterious manoeuvres of academic publish
ing and highlights how closely a central area of academic life is coupled to
market imperatives. This republication therefore offers something of a vivid
illustration of the thesis presented in the final chapter of this book, suggest
ing one way in which dominant social discourses regulate interactions and
practices in other domains. The fact that the book has been taken up by
another publisher, of course, also shows the influence of wider interests in
publishing and how individual editors can make a difference. As I said, a mys
terious place to be.
This second incarnation, however, offers me a brief opportunity to situ
ate this book more generally in the field of English for Academic Purposes,
a field which has grown enormously in the past twenty-five years and which
has continued to develop rapidly since the book's original publication four
years ago. In an era of globalisation, English is now established as the world's
leading language for the dissemination of academic knowledge. Whether
we see this as a facilitative lingua franca or a rampaging Tyrannosaurus rex
(Swales, 1997), the dominance of English has transformed the educational
experiences and professional lives of countless students and academics across
the planet. Fluency in the conventions of English academic discourses is now
virtually essential as a means of gaining access to the knowledge of our disci
plines and navigating our careers. It has also reshaped the ways that teaching
and research are conducted in higher education, not only creating the multi
million dollar enterprise of EAP, but leading to the recognition that native
English speakers also benefit from an explicit understanding of the arcane
and alien discourses of their fields.
This expansion, both of English and the linguistic and cultural heterogene
ity of students in higher education, means that support for student writing is
often embedded in the mainstream curriculum at universities. Writing is now
an integral feature of many university courses and professional development
programmes, and this has led, in turn, to a more urgent need to understand