Academic Discourse Across Disciplines, Ken Hyland & Marina Bondi (Eds.), Linguistic Insights 42, Bern: Peter Lang (2006). ISBN 3-03911-183-3, ISSN 1424-8689, US-ISBN: 0-8204-8396-6 (320 pp., £35.20, US$59.95, €50.30) (original) (raw)

This anthology, edited by Ken Hyland and Marina Bondi, comprises 12 articles comparing academic discourse in different academic disciplines. It deals with various types of written texts, such as journal articles, abstracts, acknowledgements, textbooks and book reviews. It also includes three papers on spoken academic discourse, which gives the book a larger scope than most earlier genre volumes. Somewhat surprising, however, is that none of the papers deal withdor even refer todstudies on other languages than English. For scholars interested in academic discourse more generally, a more lucid title of the anthology would therefore have been ''English academic discourse across disciplines.'' This, however, should not discourage scholars with other focuses than English from reading the book, as it presents a number of interesting and inspiring studies on academic discourse. The first chapter, written by Ken Hyland, introduces important analytical concepts and gives an overview of studies of English academic discourse across disciplines. Hyland also brings up one of the key issues of the volume, namely, what the relationship is between discourse and discipline. He sketches a constructivist perspective on writing, claiming that every discourse community is composed of individuals who differ in how far they subscribe to its various goals and methods. Actions and understandings in human institutions are influenced by the personal and biographical as well as by the institutional and sociocultural. Nevertheless, Hyland writes, there are common ways in which we construct our writing, and our textualizing work as members of a discipline can be seen as a way of 'doing biology' or 'doing sociology.' This discussion on the relationship between discourse and discipline is indeed very interesting and valuable as a guide-and request-for future studies on academic discourse. For the purpose of the current volume, however, it is less obvious what its relevance is, as most of the studies presented in the papers are based on large-scaled corpora, which do not allow the analyst to use a constructivist perspective. Another focus in relation to this issue is what counts as a discipline. Most academic scholars know that it is not always clear what we actually mean by terms like 'discipline,' 'domain,' 'area' and 'field'. And looking at the structuring of the academic world, it is also unclear what actually is delimited by a 'discipline.' Using chemistry as a case for her discussion, Anna Mauranen shows how the subdivision of chemistry as a disciplinary area varies from one university to the other. Her conclusion is that there are diverse understandings of how the 'discipline' divides up. The reader of Academic Discourse Across Disciplines, and of this review, should have her conclusion in mind, given that the authors of this volume seem to have somewhat different understandings of what counts as a discipline. After Hyland's introductory chapter 10 chapters follow, organized in three sections. The first section deals with written argument and reasoning. Marina Bondi analyses the interplay between narrative and argumentative structures in research articles in two closely related disciplines, namely economics and business management. Among other things, she is able to show the different role played by empirical research. Her analysis shows that narrative inserts are usually meant for model-testing in economics, while they are more often seen as tools for model-developing in business management. Marc Silver explores differences across four academic disciplines, two representing the 'hard' or exact sciences and two the 'soft' or social sciences. Within each 'domain' he chooses one discipline representing a highly theoretical, speculative discipline and one which is more empirical, experimentally guided. Focusing on the most frequently occurring verbs and using the 'world of reference' distinction, Silver is able to highlight affinities between disciplines which are not usually treated as similar, such as those between physics and economics, whereas there is a lack of affinities across economics and business. Philip Shaw presents a small investigation into the mathematical language of engineering, physics and pure mathematics. He compares textbook examples used in teaching in classes with Swedish students with these students'