3.3 Linguistic Variation Across Academic Disciplin...
Texts are an important vehicle for producing, storing, communicating, and evaluating knowledge in academic disciplines. Disciplinary texts are constructed in distinct language patterns that enable content experts to engage in different social practices. These language patterns, introduced in Chapter 1, are often unfamiliar to college students and present significant obstacles to their comprehension and composition. Some of these language patterns are identified and discussed below. Recognizing discipline-specific ways of using language can help students develop an enhanced sense of how a discipline organizes knowledge and construes ideology through language, enabling them to better comprehend and compose academic and disciplinary texts.
3.3.1 Literature
In the English literature class, students read and enjoy a great variety of literary works from different historical periods, including poetry, drama, adventures, biographies, science fictions, folktales, comedies, tragedies, mythology, fantasies, and short stories. Because literature relates closely to the concerns, emotions, behaviors, imaginations, dreams, and other aspects of ordinary human life, it typically draws on the same sort of language that we use in our everyday social interaction. What makes literature a work of art is the creative ways this everyday language is manipulated for aesthetic ends. As Lukin (2004, p. 72) observed,
What makes a text literary is not that it draws on some particular style of language, but that it exploits the properties or resources of language, organizing them so that they have particular stylistic and semantic consequences. It is the particular way of using language, the same language which is drawn on and developed in the day by day language behavior of the members of a linguistic community. (emphasis original)
In other words, literature draws on the lexicogrammatical resources from the same sort of language that we use in our everyday social interactions, and it is the patterning of these resources that gives a piece of literature its special character.
Text 3-1 is an excerpt from The Dangerous Days of Daniel X (Patterson & Ledwidge, 2008, p. 220), a popular science fiction for young adults. The novel is about the adventures of Daniel X, a superpowered alien whose mission is to defend the Earth — and in the process have vengeance — against the more malignant, threatening aliens who killed his parents.
Text 3-1
I let him keep coming until the last possible second, when I dropped low and tumbled directly under his legs. I even managed to hook my right foot around his leg and trip him.
The home and away crowd cheered as he landed hard enough to crack the stone ground.
Okay, I thought. So far, so alive.
Seth grunted as he got up and shook his mammoth shoulders. He jogged toward me, then stopped and grinned. He curled his claws, crouching in a kind of kung fu stance.
I put up my fists beside my head and crouched, waiting for the next, furious attack.
But instead of the roundhouse kick I was expecting, a forked bolt of red lightening erupted out of Seth's mouth. It struck me point-blank in the forehead.
Narrated in the first person, this excerpt describes the battle between the protagonist (I) and its chief antagonist (Seth). The text uses simple clauses with simple nouns referring to participants that are mostly concrete and specific (e.g., I, him, Seth, it), simple but vivid verbs representing what is going on (e.g., keep coming, dropped, curled, erupted), and simple prepositional phrases indicating the circumstance of the actions (e.g., under his legs, beside my head, out of Seth's mouth). Many of these clauses are linked together into sentences through coordination (and, then, but) and/or subordination (until, when, as). The characters' feelings, thoughts, and speech (e.g., cheered, thought, grunted) are juxtaposed with dynamic actions to create a lively scene that engages the reader. These grammatical patterns enable the authors to, in the words of Halliday (1994), " 'choreograph' very long and intricate patterns of semantic movement while maintaining a continuous flow of discourse that is coherent without being constructional" (p. 224).
3.3.2 Science
Science is a discipline that strives to understand how the universe works. It involves the use of not only rigorous scientific methods for observing, identifying, describing, and experimentally investigating the natural phenomena, but also a specialized form of language for constructing and communicating scientific theories, principles, processes, understandings, and reasoning (Halliday & Martin, 1993; Martin & Veel, 1998; Yore et al., 2004). The social practices of scientists are catalogued in a range of genres that students are expected to be able to read and write. The predominant genre of college science is the research report. The structure and grammar of the research report are necessarily different from those of literature, as they provide the semiotic means with which scientists do, explain, theorize, organize, and challenge science. Unlike the more dynamic language of Text 3-1, the language of science tends to be more static, as it has over the centuries evolved to foreground grammatical participants and background actions and processes. As Halliday and Martin (1993, p. 15) explained,
Where the everyday "mother tongue" of commonsense knowledge construes reality as a balanced tension between things and processes, the elaborated register of scientific knowledge reconstrues it as an edifice of things. It holds reality still, to be kept under observation and experimented with; and in so doing, interprets it not as changing with time (as the grammar of clauses interprets it) but as persisting — or rather, persistence — through time, which is the mode of being a noun.
The static nature of the language of science is exemplified in Text 3-2. The excerpt comes from an article published in Nature (Kirkegaard et al., 2010, p. 551), a highly regarded international journal in the field of science. The research report is about heat shock protein 70 (Hsp70), an evolutionarily highly conserved molecular chaperone that promotes the survival of stressed cells by inhibiting lysosomal membrane permeabilization.
Text 3-2
The described molecular mechanism underlying the lysosome-stabilizing effect of Hsp70 may explain the recently reported surprising neuroprotective and behavioral effects of extracellular Hsp70 administered either to the sites of injury or intranasally. Taken together with the reported neuronal effects of exogenous Hsp70 in vivo, our data greatly encourage the pre-clinical testing of the efficacy of exogenously administered rHsp70 alone or in combination with rASM in animal models of NPD.
This text deals with a highly technical topic that is far removed from students' everyday life experience. To construct this specialized knowledge, the text uses language patterns that are different from those used in Text 3-1. One obvious feature of Text 3-2 is the use of specialized vocabulary and acronyms (e.g., molecular, mechanism, lysosome, Hsp70, neuronal, in vivo, efficacy, exogenously, rASM, NPD). These specialized terms populate four expanded noun phrases that are put in syntactic relations of co-existence, revelation, or causation. The four expanded noun phrases are:
· the described molecular mechanism underlying the lysosome-stabilizing effect of Hsp70
· the recently reported surprising neuroprotective and behavioral effects of extracellular Hsp70 administered either to the sites of injury or intranasally
· the reported neuronal effects of exogenous Hsp70 in vivo
· the pre-clinical testing of the efficacy of exogenously administered rHsp70 alone or in combination with rASM in animal models of NPD
Each of these noun phrases compacts a large quantity of information that in the more commonsense language of everyday life would normally require several sentences to express. The second noun phrase, for example, can be unpacked into several commonplace sentences as follows:
Extracelluar Hsp70 was administered either to the sites of injury or intranasally. It had neuroprotective and behavioral effects. These effects are surprising and have recently been reported.
It is through multiple layers of grammatical modification and embedding that discrete pieces of information are integrated and compressed into the nominal structure. The structure of this expanded noun phrase can be deconstructed as follows:
Premodifier: the recently reported surprising neuroprotective and behavioral(https://www.daowen.com)
Head: effects
Qualifier: of extracellular Hsp70 administered either to the sites of injury or intranasally
As Text 3-2 shows, science discourse privileges nouns, as they are a key grammatical resource for compacting information, creating technical objects, developing logical reasoning, facilitating discursive flow, and achieving precision and concision (Halliday & Martin 1993; Vande Kopple 1994). At the same time, however, they also result in texts that are simultaneously technical, dense, and abstract, as every nominal compacting creates progressively higher order abstraction and technicality that bury concrete referential information, making them increasingly difficult to comprehend and critique. This way of presenting information and structuring text is different from Text 3-1, where nouns are generally short and simple and clauses are typically strung together through paratactic and/or hypotactic relations.
Another prominent feature of modern science discourse is multimodality. Science texts are "semiotic hybrids" (Lemke, 1998, p. 87). They often integrate visual (e.g., tables, diagrams, charts), graphical (e.g., maps, drawings, photographs), and mathematical (e.g., symbols, equations, algebraic derivations) resources with linguistic resources (e.g., words in sentences and paragraphs). This multimedia co-deployment is necessary because linguistic resources are no longer adequate for making meaning in modern Western science (Lemke, 2002). Although multimodality is not present in Text 3-2, it is abundantly evident in the article from which the excerpt is taken. The six-page research report contains 21 figures and numerous mathematical symbols and equations, which facilitate more accurate and efficient presentation of information.
3.3.3 History
History involves the retelling, analysis, and interpretation of significant past events. It is constructed through a distinct kind of discourse that comprises three major genres: recording, explaining, and arguing (Coffin, 2006; Martin, 2002). The recording texts recount past events as they unfolded naturally through real time; the explaining texts explain the causes, consequences, and significance of historical events; and the arguing texts advance a particular interpretation on past events and defend it with a series of argument and supporting evidence. Each of these genres enables the historian to think and write about the past in a different way. Typical historical texts juxtapose these three genres in different ways, with some texts relying heavily on chronological recounting of past events and others incorporating more explanation or argument.
As a branch of social sciences, history takes on the discursive features of both science and humanities. This means that we can find evidence of both scientific language and literary language in historical discourse. A case in point is Text 3-3, which is excerpted from Chris Crowe's (2003) highly acclaimed Getting Away with Murder (pp. 35-36). The book chronicles the historically significant trial of two white men who abducted and killed a black boy named Emmett Till in the state of Mississippi.
Text 3-3
Emmett Till knew nothing of the dangerous and tense climate in Mississippi that he and his cousin would enter on August 21, 1955. To make matters worse, as a boy raised in Chicago, he didn't understand anything about the racial attitudes of white Mississippians or the policies and taboos established by Jim Crow laws. Emmett's mother, born and raised in Mississippi, tried her best to prepare him for what he would encounter in her home state.
"Emmett was born and raised in Chicago, so he didn't know how to be humble to white people. I warned him before he came down here; I told him to be very careful how he spoke and to say 'yes sir' and 'no ma'am' and not to hesitate to humble himself if he had to get down on his knees … I was trying to really pound it into him that Mississippi was not Chicago … I explained to Emmett that if he met a white woman, he should step off the street, lower his head, and not look up. And he thought that was the silliest thing he'd ever heard."
Sadly, Emmett Till's lack of experience with Southern customs, his unwillingness to follow his mother's advice, and the brashness and sense of invincibility that many fourteen-year-old boys possess led him to violate one of the South's most fiercely protected taboos at a time when racial tensions were primed to explode.
His cocky and naïve indiscretion in Money, Mississippi, on the night of August 24, 1955, inflamed the hatred of two local white men, men who believed every word of Tom P. Brady's Black Monday and all the other racist rhetoric that had circulated in Mississippi since the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision. They'd been waiting for trouble, for a "glib young negro" from Chicago or New York to step out of line. When he did, they made sure to make an example out of him.
The main purpose of this excerpt is to explain the causes of Emmett Till's kidnapping and murder. The text is populated with abstract things. The abstract things here are different from those presented in Text 3-1 and Text 3-2. Text 3-1 consists of mostly concrete things (e.g., I, Seth, the forehead) and only a couple of generic abstractions (e.g., a kind of kung fu stance), which, according to Martin (1997), are terms for generic dimensions of meaning such as manner, time, way, type, color, shape, and size. In Text 3-2, we have technical abstractions that often have no concrete referents in the material world and have to be linguistically defined (e.g., molecular mechanism, the lysosome-stabilizing effect, the efficacy). The abstractions in Text 3-3, on the other hand, are primarily of three kinds: institutional, semiotic, and metaphoric (Martin, 1997). The institutional abstractions include terms like the policies and taboos, Jim Crow laws, Tom P. Brady's Black Monday, and Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision. Martin (1997, p. 31) referred to these as "bureaucratic ratchets" that organize people's lives. The semiotic abstractions are terms that refer to facts, ideas, concepts and notions. These include words like climate, attitudes, and rhetoric.
The metaphoric abstractions are nominalizations that express in noun forms what would normally be expressed in verb or adjective forms. Examples of this kind include lack, unwillingness, brashness, invincibility, tensions, indiscretion, and hatred. These nominalized entities, together with the institutional and semiotic abstractions, help create a world of abstractions, which is contrary to the world of action and emotion depicted in Text 3-1 and the world of technicality and density conveyed through Text 3-2. They enable the author to bundle together events over time into a package (Jim Crow laws, Tom P. Brady's Black Monday, the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision), to ascribe judgment (the dangerous and tense climate, his cocky and naïve indiscretion), and to expand information (Emmett Till's lack of experience with Southern customs, his unwillingness to follow his mother's advice, the brashness and sense of invincibility that many fourteen-year-old boys possess, all the other racist rhetoric that had circulated in Mississippi since the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision).
Another kind of grammatical metaphor that is common in historical discourse is the use of verbs (e.g., lead to, ensue, make), nouns (e.g., reason, effect, response), and prepositional phrases (e.g., with, for, through, from) to realize causality that in the more commonplace language of everyday life is typically realized between clauses through conjunctions (e.g., because, so). For example, the verbs led to and inflamed are used to construe causality in Text 3-3. Such within-clause logical reasoning necessitates the causes and effects of historical events to be constructed as abstract things. Thus, we see that it is Emmett Till's lack of experience (with Southern customs), his unwillingness (to follow his mother's advice), and the brashness and sense of invincibility that cause him to behave in ways that violate Southern taboos and policies. And it is his indiscretion that causes the two white men's racial hatred to explode. Martin (2002) noted that by construing causal relations clause internally rather than between clauses, historians have available to them a much wider repertoire of linguistic resources — nouns, verbs, and prepositions, besides conjunctions — to delicately explain how one thing leads to another. In so doing, however, they also make explanations less accessible to comprehend and critique.
In offering his analysis of the Emmett Till case, the author juxtaposes explanation with retelling of selected past events, giving his interpretation an aura of authenticity, objectivity, and credibility. In recounting how Emmett Till's mother prepared her son for the Southern ways of life, for example, the author uses the grammatical resources typical of a literary narrative discussed in Text 3-1, such as short and simple nouns (e.g., Emmett, he, I, his knees, a white woman), colloquial lexis (e.g., didn't, ma'am, really), logical conjunctions (e.g., and, so, before, if), and simple clauses linked into sentences through coordination and subordination (e.g., Emmett was born and raised in Chicago, so he didn't know how to be humble to white people.). By sandwiching the narrative in-between the analysis and interpretation, the author in effect creates a rhetorical organization that Martin (2002) referred to as "waves of abstraction", in which the beginning paragraph of a text (topic paragraph) and the beginning sentence of a paragraph (topic sentence) are highly distilled and abstract, the more narrative recount of events that follows the introduction becomes less abstract and more concrete, and the ending paragraph (conclusion) or the end of a paragraph is again highly distilled and abstract. This "sandwich texture", as Martin (2002, p. 107) called it, facilitates the analysis and interpretation of historical events and is a key feature of historical discourse.
3.3.4 Law
Finally, we look at the discipline of law. Legal documents, such as tax laws, are designed to regulate people, compelling them to act and behave in certain ways according to pre-established rules and regulations. As such, they must be written with precision so as to minimize ambiguity and with authority so as to establish institutional power. Laws that are written with precision and authority leave fewer loopholes and have a better chance of fulfilling their original intents and purposes. These meanings are realized through grammatical resources such as specialized lexis, restrictive phrases, expanded noun phrases with multiple embeddings, and passive voice (Iedema, 1997; Thuronyi, 1998).
Text 3-4 (Laing, 2009) is an excerpt from a legal document on limiting tax relief for high income individuals. It represents the sort of technocratic discourse widely used in the bureaucratic-administrative settings. Here, the tax levying authority of the government is constructed linguistically through such devices as specialized lexis, declarative sentences, and passive voice. The text uses both technical vocabulary (e.g., pension contributions, tax relief, "anti-forestalling" provisions, special annual allowance) and vernacular terms with specialized meanings (e.g., value, charge) that are themselves semiotic abstractions referring to the concepts in business and finance fields. These technical items, coupled with the exclusive use of declarative sentences and the absence of modality (e.g., can, may), present the government as the expert who knows in no uncertain terms what it is doing and is assertive in presenting information.
Text 3-4
From 6 April 2011, tax relief on pension contributions will be restricted to people with taxable income of ￡150,000 or more. Above that level of income, the value of pension tax relief will be tapered down until it is 20% for those with incomes over ￡180,000.
There will be "anti-forestalling" provisions in the interim which apply to individuals with incomes of ￡150,000 or more who, on or after 22 April 2009, change their normal pattern of regular pension contributions or the normal way in which their pension benefits are accrued and whose total pension contributions or value of additional benefits accrued ("pension savings") exceed ￡20,000 a year (the special annual allowance). The provisions will apply a special annual allowance charge (SAAC) to the excess contribution.
The text also uses passive voice to depersonalize the legal mandate (e.g., will be restricted, will be tapered down). By burying the government institution that issues the rules and does the actual act of restricting people and tapering down tax relief, the distance between the government and the people (taxpayers) is created. This has the effect of limiting space for negotiation and disagreements (Iedema, 1997), compelling taxpayers to comply unconditionally.
The text is also precise. The precision is achieved through the use of not only specialist lexis, but also expanded noun groups and interruption constructions. The first sentence of the second paragraph, for example, contains an unusually long noun phrase:
"anti-forestalling" provisions in the interim which apply to individuals with incomes of ￡150,000 or more who, on or after 22 April 2009, change their normal pattern of regular pension contributions or the normal way in which their pension benefits are accrued and whose total pension contributions or value of additional benefits accrued ("pension savings") exceed ￡20,000 a year (the special annual allowance)
This noun phrase contains a head (provisions), a premodifier ("anti-forestalling"), an interruption construction (in the interim), and a qualifier that is itself an embedded clause (which apply to individuals … [the special annual allowance]). This embedded clause (level 1) contains a long noun phrase that can be further deconstructed as follows:
· head: individuals
· prepositional phrase: with incomes of ￡150,000 or more
· interruption construction: on or after 22 April 2009
· embedded clause (level 2a): who … change their normal pattern of regular pension contributions or the normal way
· embedded clause (level 3): in which their pension benefits are accrued
· embedded clause (level 2b): whose total pension contributions or value of additional benefits accrued ("pension savings") exceed ￡20,000 a year (the special annual allowance)
These poly-layered modifications, interruptions, and embeddings enable the author to compact a large quantity of semantic data while at the same time being precise as to when the new law becomes effective and to whom it applies. Such precision is necessary to ensure that all possible pension tax relief loopholes are closed and that the law achieves its original intent. Sometimes, restrictive phrases such as ordinary and necessary and wholly and exclusively are used for similar purposes.
3.3.5 Summary
The four sample texts, while not representing the whole range of textual diets that are available to college students, demonstrate nonetheless some of the key features of academic and disciplinary texts in postsecondary education. These texts are constructed in characteristic patterns of language that present new forms, purposes, and processing demands. These language patterns are not just complexities that construct barriers to privilege content experts; rather, they have evolved to meet the needs of particular disciplines, enabling disciplinary experts to engage in their professional practices.
The foregoing linguistic excursion of four sample disciplinary texts suggests that each academic discipline has characteristic language patterns that make it distinct from other disciplines. For example, the language of literature is found to be dynamic and emotive in the sense that it constructs a textual world full of actions and feelings. The language of science is more static and crystalline in that it has a preference for nouns, which are functional in creating technical taxonomies, compacting information, establishing discursive flow, and developing logical reasoning. The language of history builds a world of abstractions that enables the historian to infuse judgment and interpretation in the analysis of historical events. The language of law prizes authority and precision in order to compel compliance through a technocratic discourse that foregrounds technicality, depersonalization, and institutional power. While these disciplines share some common discourse features that render them recognizable as academic, these features function differently in different disciplines. For example, nominalization is a key feature of academic texts in advanced learning, but it serves different functions in different disciplines. In science, nominalization helps accumulate meanings so that a technical term can be defined or an explanation sequence can be synthesized for further discussion; in history, on the other hand, nominalization is more often used to realize events as grammatical participants so that historians can efface themselves as interpreters of events and in so doing position the reader to accept their interpretations as unproblematic (Unsworth, 1999).